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Authors: John Berryman
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best poetry of the century is extremely difficult,” Lowell tells his audience, and he doesn’t mean “such poems as ‘The Waste Land,’ which originally seemed difficultand is now simpler than Longfellow almost.” According to him, there are certain poems that remain difficult—like the “Atlantis” section of Hart Crane’s The Bridge —and great. After the Modern poets—Stevens, Eliot, Ransom, Moore, Crane, Pound, and Frost—suddenly poetry was clear again, Lowell says. People felt you couldn’t be unintelligible anymore. But then Berryman’s poems began to appear, and“they made all the clear stuff seem mannered and tired.”
Berryman and Lowell met at Princeton in 1944, during the waning of the war, and Lowell found Berryman to have “a casual intensity” and the “almost intimate mumble of a don.” He loved Hopkins, Yeats, and Auden, whose “shadows paled him.” “Berryman might have grown into an austere, removed poet,” Lowell felt, “but instead he somehow remaineddeep in the mess of things. His writing has been a long, often back-breaking search for an inclusive style, a style that could use his erudition and catch the high, even frenetic, intensity of his experience, disgusts, and enthusiasms.” The Dream Songs, with their “racy jabber,” are “larger and sloppier” than anything Berryman had written before. Writing in The New York Review of Books , Lowelldescribed their bruised world of “remorse, wonder, and nightmare”:
The scene is contemporary and crowded with references to news items, world politics, travel, low life, and Negro music. Its style is a conglomeration of high style, Berrymanisms, Negro and beat slang, and baby talk … There is little sequence, and sometimes a single section will explode into three or four separate parts. At firstthe brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder, and oddness … The poems are much too difficult, packed, and wrenched to be sung. They are called songs out of mockery, because they are filled with snatches of Negro minstrelsy … The dreams are not real dreams but a waking hallucination in which anything that might have happened to the author can be used at random. Anything he has seen,overheard, or imagined can go in. The poems are Berryman, or rather they are about a person he calls Henry . Henry is Berryman seen as himself, as poète maudit , child and puppet. He is tossed about with a mixture of tenderness and absurdity, pathos and hilarity that would have been impossible if the author had spoken in the first person.
In a letter to his friend Elizabeth Bishop, Lowell calls 77 Dream Songs “spooky, a maddening work of genius, or half genius, in John’s later obscure, tortured, wandering style, full of parentheses, slang no one ever spoke, jagged haunting lyrical moments, etc.” And Bishop replies, “I’m pretty much at sea about that book—some pages I find wonderful, some baffle me completely. I am sure he is saying something important—perhaps sometimes too personally?”Elsewhere, she praises the “wonderful little things, in flashes—the glitter of broken glasses, smashed museum cases—something like that.”
Before Berryman published 77 Dream Songs , his historical poem “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” had been called “the most distinguished long poem by an American since ‘The Waste Land.’” It was one of the famous academic poems of the 1950s, though today it islargely eclipsed by the more original, less shapely, occasionally volcanic, continually haranguing 77 Dream Songs , with its wild syntax that suggests a heavy heart and a frightened, self-pitying, angry, guilty, irritable, and generally aberrant mind. After the Bradstreet poem was published, there was a silence of two years before Berryman began writing the Dream Songs, which he continued workingon until his death.
The Dream Songs is a work consisting of 385 individual poems compiled in two books, 77 Dreams Songs (1964), which makes up
Berryman and Lowell met at Princeton in 1944, during the waning of the war, and Lowell found Berryman to have “a casual intensity” and the “almost intimate mumble of a don.” He loved Hopkins, Yeats, and Auden, whose “shadows paled him.” “Berryman might have grown into an austere, removed poet,” Lowell felt, “but instead he somehow remaineddeep in the mess of things. His writing has been a long, often back-breaking search for an inclusive style, a style that could use his erudition and catch the high, even frenetic, intensity of his experience, disgusts, and enthusiasms.” The Dream Songs, with their “racy jabber,” are “larger and sloppier” than anything Berryman had written before. Writing in The New York Review of Books , Lowelldescribed their bruised world of “remorse, wonder, and nightmare”:
The scene is contemporary and crowded with references to news items, world politics, travel, low life, and Negro music. Its style is a conglomeration of high style, Berrymanisms, Negro and beat slang, and baby talk … There is little sequence, and sometimes a single section will explode into three or four separate parts. At firstthe brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder, and oddness … The poems are much too difficult, packed, and wrenched to be sung. They are called songs out of mockery, because they are filled with snatches of Negro minstrelsy … The dreams are not real dreams but a waking hallucination in which anything that might have happened to the author can be used at random. Anything he has seen,overheard, or imagined can go in. The poems are Berryman, or rather they are about a person he calls Henry . Henry is Berryman seen as himself, as poète maudit , child and puppet. He is tossed about with a mixture of tenderness and absurdity, pathos and hilarity that would have been impossible if the author had spoken in the first person.
In a letter to his friend Elizabeth Bishop, Lowell calls 77 Dream Songs “spooky, a maddening work of genius, or half genius, in John’s later obscure, tortured, wandering style, full of parentheses, slang no one ever spoke, jagged haunting lyrical moments, etc.” And Bishop replies, “I’m pretty much at sea about that book—some pages I find wonderful, some baffle me completely. I am sure he is saying something important—perhaps sometimes too personally?”Elsewhere, she praises the “wonderful little things, in flashes—the glitter of broken glasses, smashed museum cases—something like that.”
Before Berryman published 77 Dream Songs , his historical poem “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” had been called “the most distinguished long poem by an American since ‘The Waste Land.’” It was one of the famous academic poems of the 1950s, though today it islargely eclipsed by the more original, less shapely, occasionally volcanic, continually haranguing 77 Dream Songs , with its wild syntax that suggests a heavy heart and a frightened, self-pitying, angry, guilty, irritable, and generally aberrant mind. After the Bradstreet poem was published, there was a silence of two years before Berryman began writing the Dream Songs, which he continued workingon until his death.
The Dream Songs is a work consisting of 385 individual poems compiled in two books, 77 Dreams Songs (1964), which makes up
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