77 Dream Songs by John Berryman

77 Dream Songs

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77 Dream Songs by John Berryman
  • 77 Dream Songs by John Berryman
77 Dream Songs

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

77 Dream Songs

by John Berryman

$16.00
$16.00
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A wild, masterful Pulitzer Prize-winning cycle of poems that half a century later still shocks and astounds

John Berryman was hardly unknown when he published 77 Dream Songs, but the volume was, nevertheless, a shock and a revelation. A "spooky" collection in the words of Robert Lowell-"a maddening work of genius."

As Henri Cole notes in his elegant, perceptive introduction, Berryman had discovered "a looser style that mixed high and low dictions with a strange syntax." Berryman had also discovered his most enduring alter ego, a paranoid, passionate, depressed, drunk, irrepressible antihero named Henry or, sometimes, Mr. Bones: "We touch at certain points," Berryman claimed, of Henry, "But I am an actual human being."

Henry may not be real, but he comes alive on the page. And while the most famous of the Dream Songs begins, "Life, friends, is boring," these poems never are. Henry lusts: seeing a woman "Filling her compact & delicious body / with chicken páprika" he can barely restrain himself: "only the fact of her husband & four other people / kept me from springing on her." Henry despairs: "All the world like a woolen lover / once did seem on Henry's side. / Then came a departure." Henry, afraid of his own violent urges, consoles himself: "Nobody is ever missing."

77 Dream Songs won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, but Berryman's formal and emotional innovations-he cracks the language open, creates a new idiom in which to express eternal feelings-remain as alive and immediate today as ever.
Book Details
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN:
9780374534523
Binding:
Paperback
Pages:
112
Authors:
John Berryman
Published Date:
2014-10-21
Language:
English
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About John Berryman

A central figure of American confessional poetry, John Berryman (1914-1972) was born John Smith in McAlester, Oklahoma, and earned an undergraduate degree from Columbia College in 1936 before attending Cambridge University on a fellowship. His early verse appeared in Five Young American Poets (New Directions, 1940), followed by Poems (New Directions, 1942) and The Dispossessed (W. Sloane Associates, 1948). Wider acclaim arrived with Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (Noonday Press, 1956). The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry came in 1965 for 77 Dream Songs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964), which introduced his alter egos Henry and Mr. Bones; the sequence later grew into The Dream Songs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969). He taught for years at the University of Minnesota.

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