The Dream Songs
385 poems in three-stanza, 18-line form following the half-mad, guilt-ridden Henry through booze, lust, grief, and the suicides of friends. Berryman invented a new kind of dramatic monologue; Henry and his unnamed friend who calls him "Mr Bones" create a minstrel show of the self in crisis. Dream Song 14 ("Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.") is the perfect encapsulation of postwar American existential comedy.
Dream Songs runs 385 poems combined from two separate books, and sheer bulk is the complaint readers raise most: “this book of poems seems to me TOO monstrous and dense,” one writes. Others are blunter, calling stretches “Dumb, unmusical maundering stuff,” and one assigned the whole thing for class wrote flatly, “I had to read these in Poetry School.” The unnamed friend's dialect voice, rendered in blackface-coded vernacular, strikes even a sympathetic editor as “frustrating and even offensive.” Private in-jokes from Berryman's own circle pile up without context, and several readers say the back two-thirds loses the sharper syntactical control of the first 77 songs; at least one longtime reader downgraded the book on a reread and concluded it's simply dated now.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
