Difference between revisions of "John Berryman" - New World Encyclopedia

Revision as of 18:50, 3 August 2006

John Berryman (originally John Smith) (October 25, 1914 - January 7, 1972) was an American poet closely associated with Robert Lowell and the Confessionalist school of poetry who is increasingly regarded as one of the most important poets of the latter half of the 20th-century. Like the Confessionalists, Berryman's poetry is primarily autobiographical in nature, touching upon the poet's inner fears and triumphs, and attempting—as much as is possible—to raise personal emotions and reflections to the level of high art. Berryman, however, staunchly rejected being associated with Confessionalism. When asked by a reporter how he responded to being labeled a Confessionalist, Berryman replied, "With rage and contempt!"

Indeed, Berryman did as much as possible to conceal and complicate the autobiographical nature of his poetry, and it is unclear how much of his poetry is strictly autobiographical, and how much pure invention. Although Berryman was a close friend of Lowell, he was also his fiercest critic. He inveighed against Lowell and his Confessionalist movement for having turned American poetry into little more than glorified psychotherapy; and he expressed dismay at how 20th-century American poetry was rapidly leaving rhyme, meter, and traditional poetic form behind.

Berryman is perhaps best remembered for his contributions to poetic form and technique. He posessed a masterful command of rhyme and meter, but he also had the wisdom to realize that, at times, it was necessary to bend the rules of form—to, as Berryman phrased it, "crumple a syntax at a sudden need." His poetry is thus traditional and simultaneously innovative, and he incorporated a uniquely American sensibility to traditional European forms such as the sonnet. He has been compared to such luminaries as Chaucer for his ability to mix high and low diction, bringing together a range of dialects from all corners of American life. He is also remembered for the sense of humor in his poetry—something that the Confessionalists, and many poets of the late 20th-century, often lacked. Berryman's strange, musical verse is among the most unique voices of 20th-century literature, and his influence on contemporary poets only continues to expand.

Early life

John Berryman was born John Smith in McAlester, Oklahoma. Of his youthful self he said, 'I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.'

Berryman's childhood was, perhaps, the most tragic period of his life. In 1924, when the poet was ten, his father, John Smith, a banker in Florida, shot himself. The poet was the first person to discover the body. After his father's death, the poet's mother remarried, and thus he came to his new surname of Berryman. The vision of his father's suicide haunted John Berryman's poetic imagination, and the subject is addressed directly and indirectly throughout his oeuvre.

Following his mother's remarriage, Berryman attended a private school in Connecticut and ultimately went on to study at Columbia University. At Columbia Berryman proved to be an exemplary student, and he came particularly under the influence of Columbia's poet-in-residence Mark Van Doren. After graduating Berryman continued his studies at Cambridge, then returned to the United States to take up a teaching career that would take him to Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Iowa at Iowa City, and ultimately the University of Minnesota, where he would remain until his death by suicide in 1972.

Writers' Workshop

While Berryman was on the faculty of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, W. D. Snodgrass, one of the original Confesionalists, was one of the members of his class. In a volume entitled Seems Like Old Times, former student William Dickey would write, "...it was a course I approached with rapture and fear, owing in part to Berryman's sometimes jagged abruptness, as when, having warned me beforehand that he was going to exhibit the profound mortality of one of my works, he held it out at arm's length in the class, looked at it with loathing, and said, 'Now, what are we to say about this ridiculous poem?'".

Another former student, Robert Dana, would writ: "I remember a day in the old tin barracks that served as our classroom down by the river, when John Berryman scribbled some lines of mine on the blackboard. 'Dana!' he shouted across two rows of chairs, 'Do you know what that is?' He rapidly marked the scansion. 'Metrical chaos! that's what that is! Metrical chaos!' It was that kind of blow-torch approach that cut Berryman's class, in two weeks, from about 40 to thirteen. I like to think of us now as 'The Lucky Thirteen,' but we were crazy too. Crazy with the kind of toughness it took to hang in there against John's special mix of crankiness, brilliance, and cruelty."

Despite his eccentricites, Berryman is acknowledged to be one of the most phenomenal teachers of his generation. Countless poets who would go on to make their mark in American poetry would pass through Berryman's classes—Donald Justice, Philip Levine, Paul Petrie, Robert Dana, Constance Urdang, Jane Cooper, Donald Finkel, Henri Coulette and others amongst them—and almost all have remarked on his effectiveness as an instructor.

Works

Berryman's first book was Poems, published in 1942 during the Second World War, and his second was The Dispossessed, which appeared six years later. His first major work, however, was Homage to Mistress Bradstreet in 1956, which won him substantial critical acclaim. The Homage is a lengthy meditation on the obscure 18th-century American poet Anne Bradstreet. Written partly in Bradstreet's voice and partly in Berryman's, the poem shifts constantly between points of view and levels of diction, mixing 18th-century archaisms with colloquial slang.

Berryman's fame, however, would ultimately rest on a long sequence of Dream Songs, a 18-line form invented by the poet himself. The first volume, entitled 77 Dream Songs, was published in 1964 and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The second volume of Dream Songs, entitled His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, appeared in 1968. The two volumes of Dream Songs were published together as The Dream Songs in 1969. By that time Berryman, was well established as an important force in the literary world of poetry, and he was widely read among his contemporaries.

The Dream Songs is easily one of the most recognizable and unique publications in 20th-century literature. The Dream Songs, nearly 400 in all, concern the thoughts, adventures, and dreams of Henry, "a white American, sometimes in blackface", who sometimes refers to himself in the first-person, sometimes in the second, and sometimes in the third. The only other character in the sequence is an unnamed "friend", who refers to Henry as "Mr. Bones" and speaks in a black dialect reminiscent of a minstrel show. The interactions between the two characters are loosely modeled on American minstrelsy, with Henry taking the role of interlocutor—the host of a minstrel show, who often becomes the butt of jokes made by the tambo, the role taken by "the friend". Berryman himself was deeply interested in American minstrelsy and black vernacular, and he explicitly admitted its influence, and the influence of poets such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, on the style and language of The Dream Songs.

The tone of the Dream Songs is quite surreal and associative, and yet each is carefully constructed, with a great deal of control of both wording and thought hidden beneath apparent chaos. The poems appear to be nearly diary entries, and yet they are neither trivial nor occasional. Attempting to describe the Dream Songs, however, is a rather futile effort, as the poems are some of the most difficult in the language. A selection of some of the songs, however, will give the reader a better sense of Berryman's odd tone, crumpled syntax, and unique voice. Here are follows Dream Songs #1, #4, and #29:

1

Huffy Henry hid the day,

unappeasable Henry sulked.

I see his point,—a trying to put things over.

It was the thought that they thought

they could do it made Henry wicked & away.

But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover

once did seem on Henry's side.

Then came a departure.

Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.

I don't see how Henry, pried

open for all the world to see, survived.

What he has now to say is a long

wonder the world can bear & be.

Once in a sycamore I was glad

all at the top, and I sang.

Hard on the land wears the strong sea

and empty grows every bed.

4

Filling her compact & delicious body

with chicken páprika, she glanced at me

twice.

Fainting with interest, I hungered back

and only the fact of her husband & four other people

kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying

'You are the hottest one for years of night

Henry's dazed eyes

have enjoyed, Brilliance.' I advanced upon

(despairing) my spumoni.—Sir Bones: is stuffed,

de world, wif feeding girls.

—Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes

downcast . . . The slob beside her feasts . . . What wonders is

she sitting on, over there?

The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.

Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.

—Mr. Bones: there is.

29

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart

só heavy, if he had a hundred years

& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time

Henry could not make good.

Starts again always in Henry's ears

the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind

like a grave Sienese face a thousand years

would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,

with open eyes, he attends, blind.

All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;

thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,

end anyone and hacks her body up

and hide the pieces, where they may be found.

He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.

Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.

Nobody is ever missing.

In his 366th "Dream Song" Berryman himself wrote, "These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort." Elsewhere he wrote that "to make laugh and to hurt / is and was all [Henry] ever intended", and the Dream Songs veer sharply between the tones of low comedy and extreme darkness. As Berryman wrote in letters to various friends, his intention with the Dream Songs was to write poetry that would put the reader constantly off-guard—uncertain whether the next poem, or even the next line, would turn to laughter or to pain. By mixing the tones of comedy and tragedy, Berryman was able to accomplish a rare feat: a work of literature that is at times intensely funny, and at times powerfully sad.

It has been noted by many critics that 77 Dream Songs better accomplish Berryman's vision than the latter 308 poems contained in His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. As Berryman aged his tone turned increasingly darker, and the latter Dream Songs are often unflinchingly morose. Nonetheless, some of the latter poems remain both comforting and terrifying, just as Berryman intended. Here, for instance, is Dream Song no. 80, "Op. posth. no. 3,":

It's buried at a distance, on my insistence, buried.

Weather's severe there, which it will not mind.

I miss it.

O happies before & during & between the times it got

married

I hate the love of leaving it behind,

deteriorating & hopeless that.

The great Uh climbed above me, far above me,

doing the north face, or behind it. Does He love me?

over, & flout.

Goodness is bits of outer God. The house-guest

(slimmed down) with one eye open & one breast

out.

Slimmed-down from by-blow; adoptive-up; was white.

A daughter of a friend. His soul is a sight.

—Mr Bones, what's all about?

Girl have a little: what be wrong with that?

You free?—Down some many did descend

from the abominable & semi-mortal Cat.

Bibliography

Berryman, John. Poems (Norfolk, Ct.: New Directions Press, 1942)
Berryman, John. The Dispossessed (New York: William Sloan Associates, 1948)
Berryman, John. Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1956)
Berryman, John. 77 Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964)
Berryman, John. Berryman's Sonnets (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967)
Berryman, John. The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969)
Berryman, John. His Toy, His Dream His Rest (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969)
Berryman, John. Delusions, Etc. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972)

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

Dickey, James. From Babel to Byzantium: Poets and Poetry Now (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968)
Dinger, Ed. Seems Like Old Times (Iowa

External links

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

John Berryman ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

History of "John Berryman"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-'''John Berryman''' (originally '''John Smith''') ([[October 25]], [[1914]] - [[January 7]], [[1972]]) was an [[United States|American]] [[poet]], born in [[McAlester, Oklahoma]]. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the [[20th century]] and often considered one of the founders of the [[Confessional poet|Confessional]] school of poetry.  He is one of the figures acting as a bridge between the formally loose, socially aware poetry of the [[Beats]] and the personal, grieving poetry of [[Sylvia Plath]].  He was the author of ''The Dream Songs'', which are playful, witty, and morbid. Berryman died by [[suicide]] in 1972.
+'''John Berryman''' (originally '''John Smith''') (October 25, 1914 - January 7, 1972) was an American poet closely associated with [[Robert Lowell]] and the Confessionalist school of poetry who is increasingly regarded as one of the most important poets of the latter half of the 20th-century. Like the Confessionalists, Berryman's poetry is primarily autobiographical in nature, touching upon the poet's inner fears and triumphs, and attempting&mdash;as much as is possible&mdash;to raise personal emotions and reflections to the level of high art. Berryman, however, staunchly rejected being associated with Confessionalism. When asked by a reporter how he responded to being labeled a Confessionalist, Berryman replied, "With rage and contempt!"
-Of his youthful self he said, 'I didn't want to be ''like'' [[W.B. Yeats|Yeats]]; I wanted to ''be'' Yeats.'
+Indeed, Berryman did as much as possible to conceal and complicate the autobiographical nature of his poetry, and it is unclear how much of his poetry is strictly autobiographical, and how much pure invention. Although Berryman was a close friend of [[Robert Lowell|Lowell]], he was also his fiercest critic. He inveighed against Lowell and his Confessionalist movement for having turned American poetry into little more than glorified psychotherapy; and he expressed dismay at how 20th-century American poetry was rapidly leaving rhyme, meter, and traditional poetic form behind.
-==Published works==
+Berryman is perhaps best remembered for his contributions to poetic form and technique. He posessed a masterful command of rhyme and meter, but he also had the wisdom to realize that, at times, it was necessary to bend the rules of form&mdash;to, as Berryman phrased it, "crumple a syntax at a sudden need." His poetry is thus traditional and simultaneously innovative, and he incorporated a uniquely American sensibility to traditional European forms such as the [[sonnet]]. He has been compared to such luminaries as [[Geoffrey Chaucer|Chaucer]] for his ability to mix high and low diction, bringing together a range of dialects from all corners of American life. He is also remembered for the sense of humor in his poetry&mdash;something that the Confessionalists, and many poets of the late 20th-century, often lacked. Berryman's strange, musical verse is among the most unique voices of 20th-century literature, and his influence on contemporary poets only continues to expand.
-Berryman's first book was ''Poems'', published in 1942 during the Second World War, and his second was ''The Dispossessed'', which appeared six years later.  His first major work was ''Homage to Mistress Bradstreet'' in [[1956]].  However, it was the collection of Dream Songs that gathered him the most admiration.  The first volume, entitled ''77 Dream Songs'', was published in [[1964]] and won the [[Pulitzer Prize]] for poetry.  The second volume of ''Dream Songs'', entitled ''His Toy, His Dream, His Rest'', appeared in [[1968]].  The two volumes of ''Dream Songs'' were published together as ''The Dream Songs'' in [[1969]].  By that time Berryman, though not a "popular" poet, was well established as an important force in the literary world of poetry, and he was widely read among his contemporaries.
-The poems that form ''Dream Songs'' involve a character who is by turns the narrator and the person addressed by a narrator. Because readers assumed that these voices were the poet speaking directly of himself, Berryman's poetry was considered part of the [[Confessional poet|Confessional poetry]] movement.  Berryman, however, scorned the idea that he was a Confessional poet.
+==Early life==
+John Berryman was born John Smith in McAlester, Oklahoma. Of his youthful self he said, 'I didn't want to be ''like'' [[William Butler Yeats|Yeats]]; I wanted to ''be'' Yeats.'
+Berryman's childhood was, perhaps, the most tragic period of his life.  In 1924, when the poet was ten, his father, John Smith, a banker in [[Florida]], shot himself. The poet was the first person to discover the body. After his father's death, the poet's mother remarried, and thus he came to his new surname of Berryman.  The vision of his father's suicide haunted John Berryman's poetic imagination, and the subject is addressed directly and indirectly throughout his oeuvre.
+Following his mother's remarriage, Berryman attended a private school in Connecticut and ultimately went on to study at [[Columbia University]]. At Columbia Berryman proved to be an exemplary student, and he came particularly under the influence of Columbia's poet-in-residence [[Mark Van Doren]]. After graduating Berryman continued his studies at [[Cambridge]], then returned to the United States to take up a teaching career that would take him to Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Iowa at Iowa City, and ultimately the University of Minnesota, where he would remain until his death by suicide in 1972.
 ==Writers' Workshop==
-While Berryman was on the faculty of the [[University of Iowa Writers' Workshop]], [[W. D. Snodgrass]], the original confessional poet, was one of the  members of his class.  "I have been very fortunate twice in my career as a student of poetry," [[William Dickey]] wrote in [[Ed Dinger]]'s ''Seems Like Old Times'', "first to have been at [[Reed College]] as an undergraduate with [[Gary Snyder]], [[Philip Whalen]] and [[Lew Welch]], second to have been in John Berryman's extraordinary and intense poetry workshop with W. D.  Snodgrass, [[Donald Justice]], [[Philip Levine]], [[Paul Petrie]], [[Robert Dana]], [[Constance Urdang]], [[Jane Cooper]], [[Donald Finkel]], [[Henri Coulette]]&mdash;the list continues beyond the capacity of my memory, but it was a course I approached with rapture and fear, owing in part to Berryman's sometimes jagged abruptness, as when, having warned me beforehand that he was going to exhibit the profound mortality of one of my works, he held it out at arm's length in the class, looked at it with loathing, and said, 'Now, what are we to say about this ridiculous poem?'".{{Inote|Dinger p. 23|Dinger23}}
-"I remember a day in the old tin barracks that served as our classroom down by the river, when John Berryman scribbled some lines of mine on the blackboard," Robert Dana added.  "'Dana!' he shouted across two rows of chairs, 'Do you know what that is?'  He rapidly marked the scansion.  'Metrical chaos! that's what that is!  Metrical chaos!'"  But chaos was a large and natural part of Berryman's own life, including his poetry:
+While Berryman was on the faculty of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, [[W. D. Snodgrass]], one of the original Confesionalists, was one of the  members of his class.  In a volume entitled ''Seems Like Old Times'', former student William Dickey would write, "...it was a course I approached with rapture and fear, owing in part to Berryman's sometimes jagged abruptness, as when, having warned me beforehand that he was going to exhibit the profound mortality of one of my works, he held it out at arm's length in the class, looked at it with loathing, and said, 'Now, what are we to say about this ridiculous poem?'".{{Inote|Dinger p. 23|Dinger23}}
+Another former student, Robert Dana, would writ: "I remember a day in the old tin barracks that served as our classroom down by the river, when John Berryman scribbled some lines of mine on the blackboard. 'Dana!' he shouted across two rows of chairs, 'Do you know what that is?'  He rapidly marked the scansion.  'Metrical chaos! that's what that is!  Metrical chaos!' It was that kind of blow-torch approach that cut Berryman's class, in two weeks, from about 40 to thirteen. I like to think of us now as 'The Lucky Thirteen,' but we were crazy too.  Crazy with the kind of toughness it took to hang in there against John's special mix of crankiness, brilliance, and cruelty."
+Despite his eccentricites, Berryman is acknowledged to be one of the most phenomenal teachers of his generation. Countless poets who would go on to make their mark in American poetry would pass through Berryman's classes&mdash;Donald Justice, [[Philip Levine]], Paul Petrie, Robert Dana, Constance Urdang, Jane Cooper, Donald Finkel, Henri Coulette and others amongst them&mdash;and almost all have remarked on his effectiveness as an instructor.
+==Works==
+Berryman's first book was ''Poems'', published in 1942 during the Second World War, and his second was ''The Dispossessed'', which appeared six years later.  His first major work, however, was ''Homage to Mistress Bradstreet'' in 1956, which won him substantial critical acclaim. The ''Homage'' is a lengthy meditation on the obscure 18th-century American poet [[Anne Bradstreet]]. Written partly in Bradstreet's voice and partly in Berryman's, the poem shifts constantly between points of view and levels of diction, mixing 18th-century archaisms with colloquial slang.
+Berryman's fame, however, would ultimately rest on a long sequence of Dream Songs, a 18-line form invented by the poet himself. The first volume, entitled ''77 Dream Songs'', was published in 1964 and won the [[Pulitzer Prize]] for poetry. The second volume of ''Dream Songs'', entitled ''His Toy, His Dream, His Rest'', appeared in 1968.  The two volumes of ''Dream Songs'' were published together as ''The Dream Songs'' in 1969.  By that time Berryman, was well established as an important force in the literary world of poetry, and he was widely read among his contemporaries.
-"It was that kind of blow-torch approach that cut Berryman's class, in two weeks, from about 40 to thirteen." Dana continued.  "I like to think of us now as 'The Lucky Thirteen,' but we were crazy too.  Crazy with the kind of toughness it took to hang in there against John's special mix of crankiness, brilliance, and cruelty.  And we were brash in our own ways.
+''The Dream Songs'' is easily one of the most recognizable and unique publications in 20th-century literature. The Dream Songs, nearly 400 in all, concern the thoughts, adventures, and dreams of Henry, "a white American, sometimes in blackface",  who sometimes refers to himself in the first-person, sometimes in the second, and sometimes in the third. The only other character in the sequence is an unnamed "friend", who refers to Henry as "Mr. Bones" and speaks in a black dialect reminiscent of a [[minstrel show]]. The interactions between the two characters are loosely modeled on American minstrelsy, with Henry taking the role of ''interlocutor''&mdash;the host of a minstrel show, who often becomes the butt of jokes made by the ''tambo'', the role taken by "the friend". Berryman himself was deeply interested in American minstrelsy and black vernacular, and he explicitly admitted its influence, and the influence of poets such as [[Paul Laurence Dunbar]], on the style and language of ''The Dream Songs''.
-"Phil Levine punched Berryman in the eye one night, breaking a pair of glasses and establishing a life-long friendship." These kinds of personal relationships were always of great importance to Berryman.  It is a question whether he influenced his students more than they influenced him.
+The tone of the ''Dream Songs'' is quite surreal and associative, and yet each is carefully constructed, with a great deal of control of both wording and thought hidden beneath apparent chaos. The poems appear to be nearly diary entries, and yet they are neither trivial nor occasional. Attempting to describe the ''Dream Songs'', however, is a rather futile effort, as the poems are some of the most difficult in the language. A selection of some of the songs, however, will give the reader a better sense of Berryman's odd tone, crumpled syntax, and unique voice. Here are follows Dream Songs #1, #4, and #29:
-On the other hand, the U.K. poet and contemporary of [[W. H. Auden]], [[Stephen Spender]], did not believe that this sort of hot-house atmosphere was necessarily good for poets.  Spender has written, "The bad&mdash;or perhaps I should say the tragic&mdash;result of campus patronage [in the U. S.] is the depressing effect it sometimes has on major talents.  I think that the tragic and near-suicidal deaths of [[Randall Jarrell]], [[Theodore Roethke]] and John Berryman are not unconnected with their being in positions where, although they were admired, they were very isolated."{{Inote|Spender p. 286|Spender286}}
+:::1
-==Suicide==
+:Huffy Henry hid    the day,
-Berryman's life was dominated by suicide.  In [[1924]], when the poet was ten, his father, John Smith, a banker in [[Florida]], shot himself.  The poet was the first person to discover the body.  After his father's death, the poet's mother remarried, and thus he came to his new surname of Berryman.  The vision of his father's suicide haunted John Berryman's poetic imagination, and the subject is addressed indirectly in the ''Dream Songs'' several times and directly once, where the poet wishes that he could kill the corpse of his father.  Berryman was an [[alcoholism|alcoholic]], and friends reported that even as a student at [[Columbia University]] he was two different people when drinking and sober.  As a mature poet, Berryman's alcoholism and depression interfered with his ability to give readings, to speak in public, and to work appropriately.  In 1972, Berryman's [[clinical depression|depression]] led him to follow the example of his father and to kill himself by jumping from the [[Washington Avenue Bridge (Minneapolis)|Washington Avenue Bridge]] in [[Minneapolis, Minnesota]].
+:unappeasable Henry sulked.
+:I see his point,—a trying to put things over.
+:It was the thought that they thought
+:they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
+:But he should have come out and talked.
-==Poetry==
+:All the world like a woolen lover
-The ''Dream Songs'' are eighteen-line poems in three [[stanza]]s.  Each individual poem is lyric and organized around an emotion provoked by an everyday event.  The tone of the poems is less surreal than associational or intoxicated, and yet each is carefully constructed, with a great deal of control of both wording and thought hidden beneath an apparent randomness.  The poems appear to be nearly diary entries, and yet they are neither trivial nor occasional.  The principal character of the song cycle is Henry, who is both the narrator of the poems and referred to by the narrator in the poems.  Henry often speaks to himself in the guise of Mr. Bones, a [[blackface]] [[minstrel show]] version of himself.
+:once did seem on Henry's side.
+:Then came a departure.
+:Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
+:I don't see how Henry, pried
+:open for all the world to see, survived.
-In 1967, in the heart of the restless decade, Berryman published a book of near-juvenilia, Berryman's Sonnets, of which the author wrote in a verse preface, speaking of himself in the third person, "He made, a thousand years ago, a-many songs / for an Excellent Lady, wif whom he was in wuv, / shall he now publish them?"  Perhaps he should.  "So free them to the winds that play, / let boys & girls with these old songs have holiday / if they feel like it (ix)."
+:What he has now to say is a long
+:wonder the world can bear & be.
+:Once in a sycamore I was glad
+:all at the top, and I sang.
+:Hard on the land wears the strong sea
+:and empty grows every bed.
-Berryman's archness notwithstanding, the collection was interesting because it shows that his distinctive poetic diction had roots well back in his creative life.  Thus Sonnet 102:
+:::4
-:A penny, pity, for the runaway ass!
+:Filling her compact & delicious body
-:A nickel for the killer's twenty-six-mile ride!
+:with chicken páprika, she glanced at me
-:Ice for the root rut-smouldering inside!
+:twice.
-:Eight hundred weeks I have not run to Mass.&mdash;
+:Fainting with interest, I hungered back
-:Toss Jack a jawful of good August grass!
+:and only the fact of her husband & four other people
-:'Soul awful,' pray for a soul sometimes has cried!
+:kept me from springing on her
-:Wire reasons he seasons should still abide!
-:Hide all your arms where he is bound to pass.&mdash;
-:Who drew me first aside? her I forgive,
+:or falling at her little feet and crying
-:Or him, as I would be forgotten by
+:'You are the hottest one for years of night
-:O be forgiven for salt bites I took.
+:Henry's dazed eyes
-:Who drew me off last, willy-nilly, live
+:have enjoyed, Brilliance.' I advanced upon
-:On (darling) free.  If we meet, know me by
+:(despairing) my spumoni.—Sir Bones: is stuffed,
-:Your own exempt (I pray) and earthly look.
+:de world, wif feeding girls.
-In Berryman's early pieces the neo-Elizabethan imagination and metaphysical wit of ''Homage to Mistress Bradstreet'' and his other books, with the posthumous ''Delusions, Etc.'', which was published in 1972, are linked with the passion of youth, causing some readers to wish that the later Berryman had retained some of the charm and commitment to blood found in the Sonnets, instead of going far down the road toward arch confession and idiosyncratic style, as he did in his later work.
+:--Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes
+:downcast . . . The slob beside her    feasts . . . What wonders is
+:she sitting on, over there?
+:The restaurant buzzes.  She might as well be on Mars.
+:Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
+:—Mr. Bones: there is.
-The poet and critic [[Robert Phillips]] wrote that the poet's second collection "is filled with accounts of friends' deaths and suicides, events which took their toll on Berryman's psyche: Randall Jarrell, [[Sylvia Plath]], [[R. P. Blackmur]], [[Yvor Winters]], [[William Carlos Williams]], and above all, [[Delmore Schwartz]], to whose memory Berryman dedicated the book and penned Dream Songs 146-157 and also number 344.  These personal losses were experienced during a time of great public loss as well: [[John Kennedy]], [[Robert Kennedy]], [[Martin Luther King]], [[Ernest Hemingway]], [[William Faulkner]].  Yet none of these personal or public deaths figure so importantly in the volume as the suicide of Berryman's father which is, in one sense, the sole subject of the latter collection (93)." Berryman's own suicide was not the first among the Confessional poets.
+:::29
-As he developed, Berryman went in the opposite direction from that which Lowell took; he got more elaborate and obscure. "Berryman is a poet so preoccupied with poetic effects as to be totally in their thrall," James Dickey wrote.  "His inversions, his personal and often irritatingly cute colloquialisms and deliberate misspellings, his odd references, his basing of lines and whole poems on private allusions, create what must surely be the densest verbal thickets since [[William Empson|Empson]]'s."{{Inote|Dickey p. 198|Dickey198}}
+:There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
+:só heavy, if he had a hundred years
+:& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
+:Henry could not make good.
+:Starts again always in Henry's ears
+:the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.
-In his 366th "Dream Song" Berryman himself wrote, "These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort."  "And understood many have not been," Phillips wrote.  "Packed with private jokes, topical and literary allusions (Berryman's reading and personal library are legendary), they boggle many minds. When the first 77 Dream Songs...were published, [[Robert Lowell]] admitted," Phillips wrote, "'At first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder and oddness.  After a while, the repeated situations and their racy jabber become more and more enjoyable, although even now I wouldn't trust myself to paraphrase accurately at least half the sections.'"  Phillips continued, "The situation was considerably beclouded when four years later, Berryman dumped on the world a truckful of 308 additional Dream Songs, under the title ''His Toy, His Dream, His Rest''."{{Inote|Phillips p. 92|Phillips92}}
+:And there is another thing he has in mind
+:like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
+:would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of.  Ghastly,
+:with open eyes, he attends, blind.
+:All the bells say: too late.  This is not for tears;
+:thinking.
-As his career progressed, unlike Robert Lowell and most other members of the school except for Snodgrass, Berryman remained a [[formalism|formalist]], inventing for his work not only a poetic diction and a style of writing that is clearly recognizable as his own and no one else's, but a specific poem-form as well in The Dream Songs.  The form consisted of three sestet stanzas rhyming abaaba.  The rhymes changed in subsequent stanzas; the third and sixth lines in each stanza were shorter than the rest.
+:But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
+:end anyone and hacks her body up
+:and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
+:He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
+:Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
+:Nobody is ever missing.
-This is only an approximate description of the form, however, as Berryman left himself considerable leeway.  Another feature of the poems had to do with their narrative voices.  These were not, strictly speaking, egopoems, for they were often dialogues among characters named "Henry," "Mr. Bones," and the poet himself.
+In his 366th "Dream Song" Berryman himself wrote, "These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort." Elsewhere he wrote that "to make laugh and to hurt / is and was all [Henry] ever intended", and the Dream Songs veer sharply between the tones of low comedy and extreme darkness. As Berryman wrote in letters to various friends, his intention with the ''Dream Songs'' was to write poetry that would put the reader constantly off-guard&mdash;uncertain whether the next poem, or even the next line, would turn to laughter or to pain. By mixing the tones of comedy and tragedy, Berryman was able to accomplish a rare feat: a work of literature that is at times intensely funny, and at times powerfully sad.
-There was, then, a distinct dramatic element in the Dream Songs, as in no. 80, "Op. posth. no. 3," from His toy, His Dream, His Rest:
+It has been noted by many critics that ''77 Dream Songs'' better accomplish Berryman's vision than the latter 308 poems contained in ''His Toy, His Dream, His Rest''. As Berryman aged his tone turned increasingly darker, and the latter Dream Songs are often unflinchingly morose. Nonetheless, some of the latter poems remain both comforting and terrifying, just as Berryman intended. Here, for instance, is Dream Song no. 80, "Op. posth. no. 3,":
 :It's buried at a distance, on my insistence, buried.
@@ Line 76: / Line 120: @@
 :Slimmed-down from by-blow; adoptive-up; was white.
 :A daughter of a friend.  His soul is a sight.
-:Mr Bones, what's all about?
+:&mdash;Mr Bones, what's all about?
 :Girl have a little: what be wrong with that?
 :You free?&mdash;Down some many did descend
 :from the abominable & semi-mortal Cat.
-This is one of the few poems in The Dream Songs that has a title, and from it the reader can infer a subject: the speaker's death.  Since the speaker of the poem is dead and the poem itself is not only published, but composed, after the speaker's demise, then one may also infer that it is a dramatic poem, the speaker imagining himself both as dead and alive and writing what amounts to an elegy for himself.  The "it" of the first three lines is the speaker's corpse, which the "I" misses.  "It" was happy at times in its life.  The "I" must leave "it" behind — an odd twist, since usually it is the person dying who leaves the living "behind."  The "I" will probably be assumed by most readers to be the soul of the "it."
-Where is the "I" going, then?  He has followed "the great Uh" which "climbed above" the "I," upon the "north face"&mdash;this is mountaineering talk.  "Uh" has climbed beyond "I."  Does "Uh" love "I"?  "over, & flout."  What is over?  Who is flouting whom?
-"The house-guest" is obscure until one recalls that the coffin has in English literary traditions been called "the narrow house."  The "it" is "slimmed down" to a skeleton "with one eye open" and its "breast out."
-The third stanza explains that before "it" was buried "it" began to be "slimmed down" before death as a result of a "by-blow," another seemingly obscure word which is cleared up by reference to the O.E.D.: The third definition of "by-blow" is "One who comes into the world by a side-stroke; an illegitimate child, a bastard."  The rest of the line thus clears up: "adoptive-up; was white."  The next line is a bit cloudier, "A daughter of a friend.  His soul is a sight."  But we can be a bit easier in our assumption that "I" is the soul of "it."
-Who is the speaker?  Is it "Mr. Bones," for a new voice in minstrel dialect appears to ask him, "what's all about? / Girl have a little: what be wrong with that?  You free?&mdash;"  It's the most natural thing in the world that a girl should want to have sex, become pregnant, and give birth to a child.  No, it isn't Mr. Bones, for previous poems will show us that the "hero" of most of the Dream Songs is someone named "Henry."  The "&mdash;Mr. Bones" is a dramatic tip-off that the poser of the question is Mr. Bones asking "Henry," the "soul" a question.
-It has been presumed that both "Henry" and "Mr. Bones" are aspects of Berryman himself; if Mr. Bones is not, then perhaps&mdash;some critics say, taking their cue from the word "bones" — he is Death who stalks the poet.  One can maintain with good circumstantial backing, however, that Henry is at least "Mr. Interloc'tor," the master of ceremonies of the traditional minstrel show that is Berryman's life, and that Mr. Bones is the blackface end-man who is the thorn in the side of the emcee.
-Henry's reply to Mr. Bones in this case is cryptic.  Many if not most of Berryman's Dream Songs will probably remain as unsatisfactorily explicated and obscure as many of [[Ezra Pound]]'s [[The Cantos|Cantos]].
 ==Bibliography==