Hurling On for Fame: John Berryman’s Uncollected Dream Songs

Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, edited by Shane McCrae. 154 pages. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2025. $28.00.

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In 1964, John Berryman sat in Abbott Hospital in Minneapolis, recovering from an alcohol-fueled East Coast reading tour, and sketched out a plan for The Dream Songs, which, it already seemed clear, would be his magnum opus. The first volume, 77 Dream Songs, had just been published to wide acclaim (it would win the Pulitzer Prize the following year), but a lot of work remained. Berryman’s plan was simple: the second volume would begin with eight “Opus Posthumous” poems, which follow Henry, the hero of The Dream Songs, through a tragicomic purgatory. These would be followed by seventy-seven additional songs, giving the work (as Paul Mariani notes in his excellent biography) a pleasing symmetry. But by the time His Toy, His Dream, His Rest was published four years later, the project had swelled to include 308 additional songs, bringing the total to 385 and making The Dream Songs one of the most ambitious works of poetry produced in the United States since Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Perhaps The Dream Songs would have been a stronger work if Berryman had stuck to his original scheme, for where 77 Dream Songs is nimble and tightly constructed, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest is a behemoth, at risk of being crushed by its own sprawling weight. Then again, if Berryman had clung to his original conception, he may have ended up with an award-winning but ultimately forgotten collection, instead of the flawed masterpiece that still captivates readers half a century after his death. For much of Berryman’s career, his work had been coded and enigmatic, with a frostiness inherited from his modernist predecessors. His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, on the other hand, spilled his personal life across the page in all its messy glory, leading critics to place him more easily among confessional poets like Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. The length of The Dream Songs also made more room for history and politics, its tumultuous advance mirroring the chaos Berryman felt building around him as his country descended into a decade of war and political violence.

After a visit to Berryman’s home in Minneapolis in 1962, Lowell quipped that he’d found the poet shut up in a room filled with “a thousand books, . . . going into the 7th year of working on a long poem that fills a suitcase.” Now, almost seventy years after Berryman began working on the book, poet and editor Shane McCrae has unearthed what remained in that battered suitcase after The Dream Songs spilled out. Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs gathers all of the drafts from Berryman’s archives that McCrae judged to be “brought to an initial state of completion.” Berryman always insisted that The Dream Songs was a single long poem—an argument McCrae bolsters in his introduction, calling the work “an amalgamation of lyrics” that constitutes a “successful, even great” epic poem. For McCrae, Henry is a combination of Odysseus and the narrator of the Divine Comedy, “but sitting in an armchair, sometimes a desk chair, at the end of a long day, talking, sometimes singing, sometimes shouting, in an otherwise empty room.” The sum of these rantings is, for McCrae, a brilliant epic poem into which the unpublished poems can be “slotted,” giving us a greater understanding of both poem and poet.

The pleasure of The Dream Songs comes in part from its juxtaposition of the literary and lowbrow, its combination of wild experimentation and extreme formal control. Here the great heavings of history loom over the “plights and gripes” of an ordinary man, and the pyrotechnic syntax that distinguishes Berryman’s best work sits alongside the flat, pedestrian language used to describe Henry’s mostly uneventful existence (“Life, friends, is boring”) and his bouts of anxiety and depression. The best of the unpublished poems maintain this delicate balance between wildness and control, histrionics and deadpan. Berryman made his living as a professor and was one of the few mid-century poets to bring the joys and drudgeries of teaching into his work. One of the uncollected songs, untitled, is a meditation on Henry’s “three arts”—teaching, scholarship, and poetry:

I am almost done, I am almost almost done.
I’ll never again give wisdom in the summer,
daily, mind you.
—I’m listening Mr. Bones. What’s wrong with the sun
& all the eager souls?—They come like a hammer,
beaten black & blue

I have three arts, one or two of which will die,
flourishes the third all to their cost
teaching everybody in this State,
twice, many, they shift their asses fifteen feet
and Henry on Joyce becomes Henry on Dante
air-conditioned at any rate.

How the weather was for the other two,
his so-called wit first, & his scholarship,
non ragioniam but look and pass.
This doesn’t look like Hell, one thrives also
where the hurried and phantastic manuscript
hurls on for Fame alas.

The end of this poem touches on one of the Berryman’s overarching subjects: his uncomfortable relationship with fame, which he courted all his life and which, when it finally arrived, seems to have destroyed him. “The applause of the world,” he writes in another unpublished poem, “comes to an empty heart.”

The poems here can indeed be “slotted in” among the published poems, at least thematically. In Only Sing, we find all the familiar topics and obsessions that distinguish Berryman’s work: politics, drinking, love affairs, travels, literature, death and grief (Berryman’s father, who died by suicide, is the ragged ghost who haunts The Dream Songs), and Berryman’s own dark fantasies of the end. But many of the poems feel like false starts, or pale imitations of those that made him famous. Berryman wasn’t always the best judge of his own work. After the success of The Dream Songs, he forged ahead with the publication of Love and Fame, a book that friends begged him not to publish and which posterity has not treated kindly—but at this earlier point in his life it seems he was still capable of looking at his work with a critic’s eye, since most of the poems here, despite a number of astonishing passages, can’t compete with the songs that made the final cut. Occasionally we get flashes of the creativity and formal energy that make Berryman at his best so original and compelling. “He is prone. Smoke on the iced lake, freer / than Henry hovers,” the speaker says in a poem written from “the locked ward,” where “hell’s bard” finds himself yet again, recovering from another bout of the many ailments that plague Henry throughout the book. Illness and death are never far from this speaker’s mind, and Only Sing contains some of the clearest, most wrenching expressions of the death wish that haunted Berryman. “But if I abide the Day,” says Henry, “worse will surely come of it, / surely will that fire be lit, / shall burn my body whole away. . . .”

For me, though, the failures are at least as interesting as the successes. It is fascinating to see John Berryman’s mind at work, to be privy to his false starts and failed attempts to move The Dream Songs in new directions. Several poems (for example, “The Third Voice” and “My friend, you are a blowhard . . .”) introduce characters that Berryman later abandoned, and several others are the kind of lyrics he often included in letters, too straightforward and sentimental to fit a project as sophisticated as The Dream Songs. A few subjects here may have been too scandalous even for a so-called confessionalist to include. One poem recounts a visit to “a north African brothel, crawling with whores / in the middle of Dublin.” Another (“Maris, my honey-love, I have to say”) appears to be a love letter to the wife of Berryman’s physician. Berryman had a history of burying work he thought might be scandalous or harmful—he waited twenty years to publish a sonnet sequence detailing his affair with a colleague’s wife—so it’s possible that he withheld some songs for personal rather than aesthetic reasons. Other poems probably felt too tedious, even for a work that contains some of the most chilling representations of tedium in all of American literature. One uncollected song gives three stanzas to a visit to a barbershop, “so that [Henry’s] ears may yet again / appear.” These exclusions help illuminate the process that birthed The Dream Songs and show the poet making the countless choices that shape a finished work.

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Though his association with Lowell and Plath likely boosted his readership over the years, Berryman hated the term confessional and repeatedly insisted that he and Henry were separate. In a prefatory note to the complete volume of The Dream Songs, Berryman emphasizes the distance between himself and Henry and clarifies Henry’s relationship to his comic foil, an unnamed friend who confused some early reviewers. He also explains that some of the poems’ convoluted syntax mimics the exaggerated slang associated with blackface minstrelsy:

The poem then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss. . . . [H]e has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr. Bones and variants thereof.

The inherent racism of minstrel shows’ grotesque parodies of Black speech, and Berryman’s awkward attempts to mimic those parodies, has alienated many contemporary readers and stalled other recent attempts to revive Berryman’s literary currency.

Any anthologist (or reviewer) who intends to bring Berryman back into the literary fold must contend with Berryman’s use of blackface, arguing either that the poems’ power warrants overlooking it or that the minstrelsy in the poems is more subtle and multifaceted than it first appears. For Kevin Young, who edited the Library of America’s Selected Poems, “[B]lack dialect (however imaginary) provides a gateway to a wider sense of American language” and offers a chance to “[break] through the polite diction of academic poetry.” In his introduction to Only Sing, McCrae writes that, while Berryman was not “perfectly enlightened with regard to issues of race . . . he recognized race relations as a, perhaps the, central problem for white Americans.” He points out that, in the introductory note quoted above, “Berryman made a point of indicating that Henry is white” and “did not allow whiteness to be the default position,” as was the style of most white authors at the time.

Berryman’s reputation has grown so fraught in contemporary writing circles, however, that in a 2020 review of the poet’s collected letters, Rick Moody opens by explaining how uncomfortable he is with the project—both because of Berryman’s “stomach churning use of blackface” and his “conduct as a man, as a father, as a husband, as a professor, as indicated in his work and biography.” Kamran Javadizadeh, in “The Roots of Our Madness,” sums up one strain of critical thought when he writes, “I doubt Berryman will be sufficiently forgotten in order to be rediscovered, but it also seems improbable that his racist politics will allow him ever again to take center stage.” And the poet Tyehimba Jess—whose Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Olio reimagines Berryman’s poems as “Freedsongs”—speaks alongside those who find little art or subtlety in Berryman’s parodies of Black speech:

I felt that the kind of use of minstrelsy that he employed in the Dream Songs was something that needed to be responded to. I’ve tried to find as much literature as I could about him and his perspective; and I never found anything that really convinced me that his uses of minstrelsy were . . . much more than a prop. A convenient, well-worn prop.

Many of Berryman’s attempts to reckon with racial injustice were failures, since he didn’t often move beyond using the Black experience as a metaphor for his own psychic pain, but he did seem more aware of his own whiteness, and was more willing to engage with racial politics, than many white writers of his era. Throughout The Dream Songs, Berryman calls attention to Henry’s race—sometimes obscurely, as when he likens his main character to a sheep (in the original dream songs) or a “crafty white mouse” (in the uncollected poems), but often overtly as well. There are many references to the White House in the book, a not-so-subtle symbol of the country’s unjust political structures, and in one poem he refers to President Eisenhower as a “Great White,” calling to mind the deadly shark, but also grouping him with the “great” men responsible for the country’s often disastrous politics. The critical conversation around these issues is too complex to resolve in any simple or final way. Though it is important to read Berryman now with an awareness of the destructive parodies his dream songs rely on and risk extending, the project does have a lot to offer readers, not only in its formal innovation, but also in its revealing portrayals of grief, mental illness, addiction, and childhood trauma.

In 1969, Adrienne Rich wrote: “The English (American) language. Who knows entirely what it is? Maybe two men in this decade: Bob Dylan, John Berryman.” Berryman’s deep, albeit fraught, understanding of the American idiom, along with his “technical daring,” draws other practitioners to his poems, and he is one of only a handful of mid-century American poets who still have a readership among the general public. References to The Dream Songs appear frequently—in books like Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, songs like The Hold Steady’s “Stuck Between Stations,” and other popular media. Each season finale of the hit show Succession, for example, is named using a line from a famous dream song. McCrae writes that Only Sing is meant for this “nonscholarly audience, to be read with pleasure,” and though there are great moments to be found in these uncollected poems, Only Sing will likely be most valuable to scholars—who no longer have to comb through the archives to access this trove of once-unpublished poems. McCrae argues that the project is justified because “the Songs are good” and because “a deceased author’s unpublished work . . . almost always ought to be” published eventually—tacitly acknowledging that these newly available poems, while accomplished, don’t stand up to Berryman’s best. Even so, there is enough of interest here, enough flashes of Berryman’s brilliant, idiosyncratic poetics, to make this a valuable addition to his oeuvre.