Explore the poem

Berryman once wrote that his Dream Songs sequence was not meant to be easily understood but ‘to terrify and to comfort’. At first reading, it may certainly seem difficult to decipher what Berryman is writing about, but the more the poem is read and heard, the more most readers begin to engage with the dark, disordered, odd world that Berryman is creating. The poems in this song sequence deal with a character called ‘Henry’ who resembles Berryman but, according to the poet, is only a fictional, unreliable version of himself.

A poet is perhaps a kind of doctor – maybe a witchdoctor – and a lyric poet writes about himself, creating spells about himself which have the power to heal in some way; to heal his society perhaps. He is ‘obliged’ by his calling; it is what he does and what he is. The operations (poems) are performed ‘on my self’ (using the materials of his life experience). And poetry, famously, hardly ever pays very well.

The voice in Berryman’s Dream Songs is that of a trickster; it is and is not Berryman himself. The world tricksters create is carnivalesque, grotesque, by turns manic and sad, but always interesting.

About John Berryman

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, John Berryman was an American poet closely associated with the confessional school of poetry. When he was only twelve years old, his father committed suicide – a tragedy that he returned to again and again in his poetry.

Berryman combined writing with an academic career, teaching for many years at the University of Minnesota.

His most celebrated collection, 77 Dream Songs, was published in 1964. Although regarded as a confessional poet, his best works always have an extra dimension, where the ‘I’ is not straightforwardly just the personality of the poet. Berryman’s style, with its sudden shifts of tone and almost neurotic, edgy syntax, can be unsettling. In a single poem he can ricochet alarmingly between high lyricism and low comedy, leaving the reader disorientated, but also engaged. His struggle against depression and alcoholism ended when he committed suicide in 1972.

Read more about John Berryman in the
American National Biography