Strange Woofs

Rowland Bagnall reads the previously uncollected dream songs of John Berryman.

By Rowland BagnallDecember 24, 2025

• Poetry

DESPITE RESPONDING to his poetry with notes of hesitation, Elizabeth Bishop appears to have predicted John Berryman’s afterlife. “One has the feeling 100 years from now,” she wrote to Robert Lowell in 1962, that “he may be all the rage.” Two years later, Berryman published 77 Dream Songs (1964). It was the first installment in what would become his seminal poetic sequence, a polyvocal cocktail of half-thoughts and competing registers, sudden contradictions and snatches of lyric—to say nothing of the poet’s controversial use of an exaggerated Black vernacular, drawing on the conventions of American minstrel shows—that has continued to delight, infuriate and baffle readers well into the 21st century. Indeed, writes Shane McCrae, who edits the new volume Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, “I have seen more people, strangers, reading The Dream Songs in public than any other book of poems,” noting that Berryman seems to have emerged (“with the possible exception of Elizabeth Bishop”) as the most-read poet of his generation.

True though McCrae’s assessment may be, Berryman’s posthumous reputation has been far from uncomplicated. Since his death in 1972, the jury has been largely out on how to square his use of racial slurs and crude, cartoonish dialect (what McCrae terms “verbal blackface”); the dream songs’ perplexing syntax and air of emotional relentlessness have won their fair share of disapproving critics as well. “Berryman had to write six poems so that one of them would succeed,” wrote Denis Donoghue; “the other five were vitiated by vanity, self-indulgence, [and] high jinks.”

Nevertheless, the dream songs and their sporadic rhythms, vulnerability, and tragicomic, hard-won truths have endured over the decades. For W. S. Merwin, the sequence remains “among the major achievements of [a] gifted and bedeviled generation.” In our era of heightened artifice and mediation, biographer Paul Mariani puts the appeal of Berryman’s voice best: “Berryman is one of the few poets we have had with the courage and raging humor to say exactly what was on his mind, whether what he said was silly, outrageous, stunning, or—as it often was—sublime and terrifying.” Now, more than 60 years after the publication of 77 Dream Songs, 152 of Berryman’s uncollected songs have been made available in one place for the first time. Drawn from his archives at the University of Minnesota, these poems again tune into Berryman’s eccentric frequency: the “strange woofs” (“Idyl V”) of a poet grappling with life’s pleasures and excruciations.

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In his own 1964 review, Robert Lowell described 77 Dream Songs as “a hazardous, imperfect book,” suggesting that “one would need to see the unpublished parts to decide how well it fills out as a whole.” In 1968, Berryman expanded the project with His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, bringing the total number of published songs to 385—an enormous epic in the tradition of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” which he cited as an influence. (Both 77 Dream Songs and His Toy were eventually combined together and reissued as The Dream Songs.) At the heart of these poems is Henry, “an imaginary character (not the poet, not me),” Berryman clarifies in an emphatic author’s note: “a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss.” Henry often refers to himself in the third, and occasionally second, person; he is also frequently accompanied by an unnamed interlocutor who refers to him as “Mr Bones and variants thereof.” The duo functions as a vaudeville double act, like two sides of Henry’s conscience, battling it out, or—as the late critic Helen Vendler has suggested—a patient speaking to their (mostly silent) psychoanalyst. As a relentless catalog of Henry’s griefs, extremes, and transformations, charting tempestuous affairs, the loss of his friends, the ups and downs of his career, his self-destructive boozing—“the whole humiliating Human round” (“Dream Song 121”)—the poems document the fluctuations of an ever-changing personality, a long cycle of minor deaths and Lazarus-like resurrections.

The poems’ shifting pronouns reflect that Henry is a man of many shapes, shades, and identities. “Henry’s pelt was put on sundry walls / where it did much resemble Henry,” begins “Dream Song 16,” an image that suggests him slipping in and out of different skins, sliding from one role to the next. There is a protean, metamorphic, even trickster-god quality to Henry’s transformations; at times, his honeyed, knife-edged syntax is reminiscent of John Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost (1667), another wonderfully self-conscious hero suffering “an irreversible loss,” enduring “all the breaks / & ill-lucks of a thriving pioneer” (“Dream Song 6: A Capital at Wells”). Known for his depth and breadth of reading, Berryman was a lifetime scholar of Shakespeare—“That multiform and encyclopedic bastard,” he once memorably called the playwright—whose works are filled with figures navigating swift changes of fortune. Though Berryman spent years working on an unrealized edition of King Lear (ca. 1605), Henry most resembles Richard II, who finds himself stripped of his crown and gloomily imprisoned, a “king” and “beggar” simultaneously: “Thus play I in one person many people, / And none contented.”

The Dream Songs is, as mentioned, an epic, one that largely takes place in the living rooms, restaurants, bars, and campus offices of jittery postwar America. The nervousness and tension of the Cold War is palpable. “I am outside,” begins one poem, “Incredible panic rules. / People are blowing and beating each other without mercy” (“Dream Song 46”). “The world grows more disgusting dawn by dawn” (“Dream Song 199”), Henry’s TV screens awash with “baseball, & the utter bloody fucking news” (“Dream Song 197”), a desperate environment where even “the architecture is far from reassuring” (“Dream Song 55”). “Henry is a hero for a disenchanted nation,” McCrae writes in Only Sing. Henry is a man “from which once-common beliefs have mostly fled,” the reliability of religion perhaps—to which Berryman would return, rediscovering Catholicism—or the conservative model of the traditional American family, the stability of paid employment or the absence of the threat of war and nuclear annihilation.

If the febrile atmosphere of the 1960s takes its toll on Henry—“Has you the night sweats & the day sweats, pal? / Pal, I do.” (“Dream Song 51”)—he is certainly not helped by his heavy drinking, tumultuous love affairs, or the string of deaths of loved ones he endures throughout the poems. His Toy, His Dream, His Rest assumes a weary, elegiac tone. It laments the loss of individuals with whom Berryman was close—particularly Delmore Schwartz, thereby blurring the lines between Henry and poet. Only Sing finds Henry much in the same predicament, suffering, as the title of one poem has it, from “terminal despair,” nursing “crazed nerves” (“Research & Development”) and disturbing symptoms: “daily diarrhea, projectile vomiting, not / to mention the wild sweating / & the friendly shaking” (“Jaunty but Undertone”). “My idea is [that] the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him,” Berryman said in a 1970 interview: “At that point, he’s in business.”

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The Dream Songs is a map of Henry’s troubles and anxieties; his pleasures, hatreds, and desires; his triumphs and humiliations. For many readers, including McCrae, this complexity contextualizes Berryman’s adoption of the minstrel show. “The Dream Songs is an epic […] of a representative twentieth-century American mind,” writes McCrae, “and it is important that it is understood to be the mind of a white person.” He goes on to conclude that “Henry’s use of verbal blackface might be off-putting, but it is essential. […] Berryman externalizes the racial anxieties of the white, mid-century American. And he seems to do so consciously.” Whether this view will carry Berryman through the next 60 years remains to be seen. What does seem clear, however, returning to The Dream Songs, is that we are in the presence of a man tormented by the life he’s living. “I saw you yesterday, I’ll see you tomorrow,” chimes Berryman in Only Sing, as though addressing his own agony: “I can’t see anyway we’ll get out of sorrow” (“I Am Free Now for These Hours”).

One of the enduring appeals of Berryman’s poetry is its humor. Henry acts as a slapstick foil, lovingly exploited with something resembling the logic of Mel Brooks: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” As Helen Vendler rightly notes, “it is precisely the triumph of the best Dream Songs to perform tragedy and comedy simultaneously,” Henry equally “jeered at and sympathized with.” And yet there is a relentlessness to Henry’s suffering, suddenly no longer funny (I am reminded of the scene in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1601) that sees Malvolio imprisoned and “notoriously abused”). Berryman was known to be a gifted raconteur, inhabiting a loud, performative, frequently alcohol-induced persona; whether reading the poems themselves or watching video recordings of the poet, however, it is hard not to observe his discomfort. This seems especially true in certain photographs, including Mark Kauffman’s photo in which Berryman appears to wince with pain, his hands tensed near his stomach and giving the impression he has just been stabbed. “Dizzy & grizzled Henry came on stage,” begins a poem in Only Sing, “and begged you tó leave O toó him alone.”

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“Is there more to say?” asks Berryman in “Dream Song 297,” “Surely I’ve said enough, / my mind has been laid open / for thirty years.” While such lines are endlessly quotable, sustaining what Lowell called Berryman’s “disrupted and mended syntax,” the dream songs—at least after the initial 77—can begin to lag, losing something of their spark and humor. “The later Dream Songs are reduced to grim reportage from the front,” August Kleinzahler writes, “ripe with pain, busy with loss” (“Dream Song 224: Eighty”), often seeming to have been written from the poet’s hospital bed or psychiatric ward. “Madness & booze, madness & booze,” barks one poem: “Which’ll can tell who preceded whose?” (“Dream Song 225: Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt”). “I would say that Berryman made a serious mistake in not culling the Dream Songs more carefully,” the critic William J. Martz writes, arguing that the inferiority of many songs dilutes the power of the whole.

As indicated, perhaps, by McCrae’s decision to sequence these uncollected songs in alphabetical order by first line, it is hard to know, exactly, what to do with Only Sing. When The Dream Songs were first published together in a single volume, Berryman considered his epic to be finished. He seemed, though, to have a sense that the remaining songs “would one day be published,” noting in an interview with Catherine Watson that it would be “up to the reader to fit those poems in among the published ones.” As such, like the appendices that sit beside a sacred text, the newly collected poems in Only Sing exist at one remove, both part of and entirely distinct from what has gone before.

In one sense, these poems are business as usual; readers open the book to find that “all seems to be going on steadily” (“At Leisure for a Little”). Henry continues to nurse the same infected ear that gives him grief in “Dream Song 128”; this has the effect of catching up with a familiar friend, and in the very best songs here, it is pleasing to be in the presence, once again, of Berryman’s exquisite music: “He make their minds blur, with that syntax.” Indeed, to repurpose a comment of Kay Ryan’s on Marianne Moore, “There is probably never a time when poetry couldn’t stand a good dose” of John Berryman. At the same time, not all of these poems strike a chord. While we may discover some new sides to Henry, especially concerning his life as a parent, Only Sing offers few revelations overall, and several of the poems are presented in a state of wobbly unfinishedness.

To that end, Only Sing suggests not only Henry’s but also, sadly, Berryman’s exhaustion. The volume stretches out Henry’s predicament further still, drawing out his suffering to an expansive total of 537 poems. At several points in Only Sing, the poems seem to be a ride Henry is desperate to get off of. It is as though he were trapped within the pages of the work itself, unable to escape, condemned to live his “only life” (“Nothing Ruffled”) upon a stage he’d rather leave: “I perform, I perform again” (“In a Concave Dream”), he suggests, “Let him out thereof!” (“Idyl III”). “Slog, slog, & damn slog,” begins “Idyl VI,” “Say a thousand years, / two thousand, and we’ll never see the end, / who mostly hope to?”

“Each year I hope the next will find me dead,” Berryman wrote to Mark Van Doren, his onetime mentor at Columbia, and “so far I have been disappointed.” After suffering with alcoholism and severe depression for many years, Berryman took his own life on Friday, January 7, 1972, leaping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis. As witnessed by a man with the astonishingly apt name Art Hitman, Berryman appeared to wave before he jumped.

Whether or not Berryman will still be “all the rage” in years to come, the endurance of The Dream Songs so far is undoubtable, the indelible transcript of a human mind twitching from one state to the restless next. With the publication of Only Sing, we glimpse the full extent of Berryman’s achievement. The final line of McCrae’s selection is fitting: “Make at midnight a bow!”