Details Appertaining To Books The Dream Songs
| Title | : | The Dream Songs |
| Author | : | John Berryman |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 427 pages |
| Published | : | April 17th 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published 1969) |
| Categories | : | Poetry. Classics. Literature. American. Fiction |
John Berryman
Paperback | Pages: 427 pages Rating: 4.19 | 6411 Users | 168 Reviews
Interpretation As Books The Dream Songs
This edition combines The Dream Songs, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965, and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969 and contains all 385 songs. Of The Dream Songs, A. Alvarez wrote in The Observer, "A major achievement. He has written an elegy on his brilliant generation and, in the process, he has also written an elegy on himself."
The Dream Songs are eighteen-line poems in three stanzas. 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. 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.
Itemize Books Conducive To The Dream Songs
| Original Title: | The Dream Songs |
| ISBN: | 0374530661 (ISBN13: 9780374530662) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Rating Appertaining To Books The Dream Songs
Ratings: 4.19 From 6411 Users | 168 ReviewsNotice Appertaining To Books The Dream Songs
I have had this book on my shelf for nearly six years. People always link Berryman to Plath, Sexton, and Lowell, so I kept continually thinking I should read this book, as I love those writers. However, every time I opened it, I felt lost in a dark, tangled woods. I just could NOT understand these poems! I would give up, put it back. Now, with a Master's in poetry under my belt, I said to myself, I am going to conquer these poems!! I must!!It's not easy. I grappled with them for about a hundredThere sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart so heavy, if he had a hundred years & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them timeHenry could not make good. Starts again always in Henry's earsthe little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.And there is another thing he has in mind like a grave Sienese face a thousand yearswould 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
I think this kind of poetry has a "sell-by" date and that it long ago spoiled ... at least for me.
The Dream Songs was an unusual and shifting work. Unfortunately, part of the shifting is that it varies in quality fairly substantially throughout the book. I found most of the Songs to be somewhat lackluster, although there were a few that I particularly enjoyed, especially Songs 14, 22, 23, and 207 (these were not the only ones I liked, but they were my favorites). The Songs tell the story of Henry, a man who is similar to, but not the same as, Berryman himself, and Henry narrates the bulk of
Mr. Berryman is one of my favorite poets. His language is subtle and his control is impeccable. What appeals most to me is how bizarre it is. Berryman has created three distinct voices: the speaker (mostly autobiographical), Henry, and Mr. Bones. The songs themselves muse on topic such as lust, boredom, beauty, etc. The poems can be hard to get into individually, however, read Dream Song No. 4 aloud and then tell me you don't want to read more. It probably won't happen.
My view of the Dream Songs is the same as just about everyone's: a few are brilliant, many are very good, the rest are daring but failed experiments. The songs in the second collection (His Toy, His Dream, His Rest) are both more numerous and less successful than those in the first, but I don't agree with the high-handed critical line (see Donald Hall & co.) that they shouldn't have been written at all. They remain more playful and passionate than the poetry of earlier Berryman phases, and
John Berryman's sweeping anti-epic joins Eliot's "The Wasteland" and Tennyson's "In Memoriam" as one of the greatest poetic series ever crafted. Berryman's influences are as panoramic as the scope of his avatar Henry's transgressions. He draws from Freudian theory and Daddy Rice's Minstrel Shows, from Apocrypha to his father's suicide, from Relativity Theory to the untimely deaths of his fellow poets. Berryman's writing is painful and visceral, ethereal and transcendent, fantasy and disturbingly
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