Why do readers return to John Berryman’s Dream Songs? The first volume, the Pulitzer- winning 77 Dream Songs (1964), chronicles the thoughts and observations of a troubled, often lustful character called Henry, sometimes thought to be a stand-in for Berryman (although he asserted that Henry was “not the poet, not me”) in seventy-seven poems, most of which are eighteen lines long, set in three irregularly rhymed six-line stanzas. Three hundred and eight more Songs appeared in His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968), which won the National Book Award and the Bollingen prize. Today, Berryman’s most famous work – an epic, in that it tells the struggles, temptations and triumphs of its hero as he journeys toward a kind of home – is at least as loved and contentious as it was more than half a century ago.
What I love most about the Dream Songs is their language. The poems (an individual Song can be simultaneously a part of an epic and a complete lyric poem) are stuffed with beautiful, musical, syntactically surprising phrases such as “So many go whirled / hellward”. But much about them could also be considered offensive, especially the language. People have been, and are, offended by Berryman’s use of verbal blackface in the poems. Sometimes, verbal blackface is used by Henry; sometimes, verbal blackface is used by Henry’s “friend” (“one of the most hostile friends who ever lived”, in Berryman’s words), with whom he frequently converses. In a note to the complete edition of the two collections, The Dream Songs (1969), Berryman describes Henry and his friend as follows:
The poem … is essentially about an imaginary character … named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof.
The important word in that description is not “blackface”, but “white”.
Often, readers of English-language texts are not told the race of a character in a work of fiction or a poem – unless that character is not white. Whiteness is the default race in the West, so whiteness is invisible and omnipresent. However, because Berryman is writing an epic of the mid-century white American male, he doesn’t want Henry’s whiteness to be invisible. Berryman could not properly emphasize – and, therefore, could not accurately communicate – the mid- century white American male’s anxieties about, and obsession with, race, and with Blackness in particular, without first making it apparent to his readers that Henry’s whiteness is something for them to have in their minds. And when Henry talks, and is talked to, in verbal blackface, what he’s talking about is whiteness: its anxieties, its obsessions, its fragility.
Readers return to The Dream Songs, I suspect, because it is profoundly thoughtful about matters readers are thoughtful about: race, yes, but also love, grief, death and joy. Many of the poems have been known to give succour to readers in times of emotional difficulty and complexity.
Despite my appreciation of Berryman’s language, in the almost three years since I came upon a stack of unpublished Dream Songs at the University of Minnesota – I had travelled there to determine if there were enough uncollected Songs to make a full-length book – I’ve thought about “For Louis MacNeice”, the least linguistically electric of the poems published on the opposite page, more than any other. There is a quiet perfection about it. The lostness mentioned in the first two lines (“I have been lost in cities, but never in London / except when you & I got separated”) haunts the poem in much the same way that the speaker of the poem seems to be haunted by his departed friend. The speaker, however, refuses that lostness by not returning to London. Thus, despite the simplicity of the Song’s language, it manages to do what all lyric poems must do if they are to be successful: it simultaneously embraces and resists its reader. It suggests a form of closure, then resists it.
Many poets have written about this necessity, but none has described it more perfectly than Isaac Rosenberg, who, in a letter to Gordon Bottomley in 1916, wrote: “Simple Poetry – that is where an interesting complexity of thought is kept in tone and right value to the dominating idea so that it is understandable and still ungraspable”. We return to The Dream Songs because it is, simply, a great poem by a great poet, and the relationship between a great poem and its reader can never be concluded – the poem will always escape the reader’s grasp, remaining thereby ever new.
Shane McCrae’s most recent book is New and Collected Hell, 2025, and he has edited a volume of John Berryman’s uncollected Dream Songs. He has been a finalist for the T. S. Eliot prize and the Forward prize. He lives in New York City.
The post The swarming King of nothing appeared first on TLS.