The Dream Songs: Poems

This edition combines77 Dream Songs, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965, andHis Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969. It contains 385 songs, an index of first lines, an index of titles, and a note by the author. In his essay on the work, Denis Donoghue says: "John Berryman has now completed the long poem,The Dream Songs, begun in 1955 . . . The poet resolved it [the problem of a long poem] in his own way; not Eliot's way inFour Quartets, Williams's way inPaterson, Pound's way in theCantos, or Hart Crane's way inThe Bridge. . . Mr. Berryman's answer was to conceive a diary, a dream diary." "A major achievement," writes A. Alvarez inThe Observer. "He has written an elegy on his brilliant generation and, in the process, he has also written an elegy on himself." Of the hero ofThe Dream Songs, James Schevill has written: "The character of Henry is a permanent addition to American literature."John Berryman is the author of 'The Dream Songs: Poems', published 1982 under ISBN 9780374516703 and ISBN 0374516707.