The Dream Songs
1969 collection of poetry
The Dream Songs is a compilation of two books of poetry, 77 Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968), by the American poet John Berryman. According to Berryman's "Note" to The Dream Songs, "This volume combines 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, comprising Books I through VII of a poem whose working title, since 1955, has been The Dream Songs." In total, the work consists of 385 individual poems.
The book is listed by the Academy of American Poets as one of its "Classic Books of American Poetry". The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry calls The Dream Songs Berryman's "major work" and says the poems "form, like his friend Robert Lowell's Notebook, a poetic journal, and represent, half phantasmagorically, the changes in Berryman's mood and attitude."
The dream song form consists of three stanzas, divided into six lines per stanza. The poems are in free verse with irregular rhyme schemes. The songs are all numbered but only some have individual titles.
Main characters
The work follows the travails of a character named Henry, who bears a striking resemblance to Berryman. But according to The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry: When the first volume, 77 Dream Songs, was misinterpreted as simple autobiography, Berryman wrote in a prefatory note to the sequel, "The poem then, whatever its 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 and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof."
In other statements about Henry's identity, Berryman is less strict about the difference, saying in an interview, "Henry does resemble me, and I resemble Henry; but on the other hand I am not Henry. You know, I pay income tax; Henry pays no income tax. And bats come over and they stall in my hair—and fuck them, I'm not Henry; Henry doesn't have any bats."
Berryman read some Dream Songs in an event at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum with Robert Lowell in 1963.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7730936. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1964, 1968, 1955 and 1963.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Dream Songs” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.