Description
Book SynopsisJohn Berryman's Dream Songs are perhaps the funniest, saddest, most intricately wrought cycle of poems by an American in the twentieth century. This title collects 77 Dream Songs, which won Berryman the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, and their continuation, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize in 1969.
Trade ReviewI'd be shucking my obligation not to ... make a renewed case for The Dream Songs.' It's a book that collects Berryman's original 77 dream songs and adds the further 308 he later wrote. This new edition includes a fond, funny and brilliant introduction by the poet and translator Michael Hofmann. Here is Berryman's masterpiece, one of those books of American poetry that, like certain mountains, has its own weather. Berryman found his form in these songs. They are serious, ambitious and elastic arrangements he could put everything into, high culture and low, Shakespeare as well as the blues, strong religious feeling as well as low impulses of every variety. "Dwight Garner, The New York Times" The character of Henry [the hero of "The Dream Songs"] is a permanent addition to our literature. "James Schevill" A major achievement ... [Berryman] has written an elegy on his brilliant generation and, in the process, he has also written an elegy on himself. "A. Alvarez, The Observer"
