When revisiting John Berryman’s monumental poem “77 Dream Songs,” one is compelled to delve into the enduring fascination with this complex and often baffling work. Thirty-five years ago, as a graduate student first encountering Berryman, the initial draw was perhaps the poem’s singular juxtaposition of formality and raw emotion – a captivating blend of decorum and profound distress. It’s this very tension, this volatile mix of tenderness and unease, that continues to resonate. Unlike much contemporary poetry that strives for neatness and resolution, the dream songs sprawl and resist easy categorization, much like life itself.
John Berryman stands firmly in the tradition of the lyric poet, a poet whose work is deeply rooted in personal emotion. This inclination towards the lyric, expressing intense inner states, is perhaps why fellow lyric poets find themselves drawn to Berryman’s oeuvre. The ancient Greeks understood lyrikos as verse suited to the lyre, an instrument of elegance accompanying intimate and personal poetry. Berryman’s work embodies this privacy, this intense interiority. He unflinchingly records not only the depths of personal degradation but also the soaring heights of love and ecstasy. When asked to define the essential components of poetry, John Berryman listed “Imagination, love, intellect—and pain. Yes, you’ve got to know pain.” Indeed, it is the palpable pain, articulated through a chorus of voices – comical, sorrowful, troubled, vulnerable, vehement, and libidinous – that keeps the dream songs startlingly relevant and unsettling even decades after their initial publication.
Speculation often arises about the origins of these disquieting poems. Were they fueled by alcoholism? Or the effects of prescribed medications like chlorpromazine and Dilantin? While such questions are understandable, they ultimately become secondary to the profound humanity at the heart of Berryman’s work. Beneath the sometimes abrasive surface and the playful, even mischievous, elements of these poems, we discern a vibrant, deeply feeling man, possessed of an expansive spirit. John Berryman, erudite and intensely perceptive, was a master of crafting poetry from the very edges of human experience, imbued with a manic creative energy. Now, half a century later, the dream songs remain a potent and multifaceted work: delicious and horrible, grotesque and ridiculous, fragmentary and yet intensely unified, a diary-like transcription of a life fully lived. This was a life of diligent work, of early mornings spent at his desk wrestling language into art, of striving to love his family, of teaching, lecturing, mentoring, and navigating the solitary path of a man of letters in the American Midwest. While envy may not have been among John Berryman’s struggles, a profound unease certainly was. And it was within this unease that he yearned for stillness, for silence, for the solace of repose.
The poetic representation of sorrow was a central concern for John Berryman. One of his innovative approaches was the dynamic interplay between Henry, the central consciousness of the dream songs, and Henry’s unnamed, empathetic, and patient confidant. Berryman recognized that the creator of a long poem needed “gall, the outrageous, the intolerable,” a quality he observed in his predecessors like Whitman, Eliot, and Pound. Part of his audaciousness manifested in occasionally giving Henry a voice inflected with Black vernacular. John Berryman held a deep appreciation for the blues, owning the complete recordings of Bessie Smith. Even as a Columbia undergraduate, he frequented the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, immersing himself in the melancholic beauty of blues music.
The dream songs, characterized by their unpredictable rhymes, their unconventional meter, their shifting styles and voices, their relentless self-examination, and their poignant code-switching, are, as Saul Bellow aptly described, Berryman drawing his writing “out of his vital organs, out of his very skin.” John Berryman deeply valued William Blake’s insightful couplet: “A truth that’s told with bad intent / Beats all the lies you can invent.” This ethos of raw, unflinching truth is what makes Berryman so compelling. Even in his moments of apparent messiness and fragmentation, one senses a profound truth striving to emerge, however imperfect or even ugly its appearance may be.
John Berryman once remarked of Mozart that “His whole life was at the mercy of his art.” This observation resonates deeply when considering Berryman himself. His life, too, was inextricably bound to his art, a testament to the consuming power and profound necessity of poetic creation.
