John Berryman’s The Dream Songs are 18 line poem dispatches from a private hell, an interior conversation and a kind of madness that facilitates self-diagnosis and a disturbed concern regarding the nature of racism, lust, literature and life itself. They are often regarded as Berryman’s finest achievement, although I find Berryman’s Sonnets more consistent and accomplished.
Berryman’s original two published books of Dream Songs have previously been compiled as a complete version, although this new gathering pointed me towards Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, a previous posthumous publication I was unaware of, published back in 1977 and containing a sizable selection of works not in the standard volume.
Shane McCrae is the editor of this new collection, and he explains how an interview with Berryman alerted him to the existence of hundreds of other Dream Songs, prompting him to undertake this project. However, many of the unpublished poems turned out to be drafts or fragments, unfinished work which McCrae has mostly not included, although the book does include some poems not yet expanded to 18 lines, and some that include lines or phrases from other poems. Although I can understand McCrae’s decision to be as invisible, or non-present, as possible, I do feel his choice of arranging the book by the alphabetical order of first line is an abdication of editorial responsibility and brings an inappropriate element of chance procedure into play.
Berryman seemed to have realised these poems would be published in due course and discussed how readers would have to slot them in to the published books as episodes in what McCrae here in his Introduction has decided is an epic. Unfortunately, many of the poems in this new book are rooted to occasion, to dedicatees, events, happenings and deaths; are much more specific in their subject than most of the previously published texts.
Many seem casual and slight, prone to striving for profundity. Or, if that seems harsh, perhaps they are profound poems trying too hard to be flippant and funny, seeking a way to make light of trauma. Sometimes the poems read as a kind of prayer and/or an attempt to provoke the God the poem is addressing. Elsewhere, the tone is often elegiac, but others of the poems feel unfinished, abandoned, unloved and somewhat isolated out of any sequence or order.
Most, of course, contain sparkling lines of repartee or astonishing asides, despite the ongoing issue of Berryman’s character at times speaking in blackface. We know Berryman was not racist (he turned down many jobs in the South because of how blacks were treated there) yet the minstrelsy ventriloquism of Henry still sometimes leaves a sour taste in the mouth, one not totally rinsed away by McCrae’s brief defence of the issue in his statement that Berryman ‘did not allow whiteness to be a default position’ and that ‘Henry’s use of verbal blackface might be off-putting, but it is essential.’
I find Berryman’s writing fascinating, both here and in general, but I have to say that despite occasional fantastic complete poems, many brilliant lines and phrases, some laugh-out-loud self-deprecation by the narrator[s], and plenty of provocative and still topical questioning, the texts here do not accumulate sense and meaning in the way previous Dream Songs do, let alone offer any narrative connections. Rather disappointingly, it feels like an aside or apocryphal excursion, a book mostly for fans, scholars and troubled poets.
Rupert Loydell 16th September 2025
