The complete Dream Songs—hypnotic, seductive, masterful—as thrilling to read now
as they ever were
John Berryman's Dream Songs are perhaps the funniest, saddest, most intricately
wrought cycle of poems by an American in the twentieth century. They are also,
more simply, the vibrantly sketched adventures of a uniquely American antihero
named Henry. Henry falls in and out of love, and is in and out of the hospital;
he sings of joy and desire, and of beings at odds with the world. He is lustful;
he is depressed.
And while Henry is breaking down and cracking up and patching himself together
again, Berryman is doing the same thing to