The Dream Songs - Softcover

John Berryman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571164315 ISBN 13: 9780571164318

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Synopsis

American poet John Berryman's long sequence, "The Dream Songs", ranges in tone from the ruefully comic to the blisteringly angry, to the tragic - sometimes within the compass of a single poem.

About this title

About the Author:

John Berryman (1914-72) was born John Smith in McAlester, Oklahoma, and educated at Colombia College and Cambridge University. He later held posts at Harvard and Princeton, before taking up a professorship at the University of Minnesota.He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965 for 77 Dream Songs, and he continued to build upon this series of poems, publishing the end result, The Dream Songs, in 1969. His Collected Poems was published after his death in 1991.

Review:

“I'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

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• ISBN 10: 0571164315
• ISBN 13: 9780571164318
• Binding: Paperback