It’s been fifty-four years since John Berryman jumped to his death from a bridge on the  University of Minnesota’s Minneapolis campus—long enough for his literary reputation to wax and wane. At the time of his death, he was arguably the most famous poet in America, with a Pulitzer, a National Book Award, a host of other accolades, and a spread in Life magazine to prove it. Berryman certainly acted out the public’s conception of how a poet is supposed to look—in the Life profile, he’s pictured in a Dublin pub, with his storied ZZ Top beard. His arms gesture wildly as he besottedly pontificates and recites sections of his masterwork, a 400-page behemoth entitled The Dream Songs. This profile appeared in 1967, during one of those periods when poetry recalibrates itself substantially, even radically. After the obtuseness and formal rigor of late modernist verse, poets were returning to vernacular language, to an intense self-scrutiny, and to a renewed fidelity to the power of metaphor. Berryman’s generational peers, figures such as Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz—all of whom were friends or acquaintances of the poet, all of whom get namechecked or elegized in The Dream Songs—helped to usher in this sea of change. Two of this group, Bishop and Lowell, were highly influential, and somewhat easy for younger poets to imitate, usually awkwardly. 

Contrast this with The Dream Songs, a book which militantly favors the complexities and reader demands of the modernists; it’s laden with allusions, distortions of syntax, and wild shifts in diction, person, and tone. The Dream Songs seems always to have readers, but almost never to have imitators. The book is too eccentric to allow for that. And probably too scary—Berryman’s protagonist and alter ego, who goes by the moniker of Henry Pussycat, but more often just plain Henry, is a maddening creation, sometimes self-excoriating, sometimes vaudeville joker; sometimes oversharing, sometimes elusive and hermetic; sometimes old-fangledly gallant, sometimes a horny id-monster. He is also almost always sloshed, and nearly always in the company of a sidekick who functions as his superego, Greek chorus, or straight man, whose role is to admonish or forewarn Henry: never successfully. These interactions are conducted in blackface, in minstrelsy argot. This vexing appropriation repeatedly collides with Henry’s penchant for ersatz-Elizabethan diction and loopy syntactical inversions. And it’s all offered in numbered, sixteen-lined sections, in stanzas made up of pentameter in lines one, two, four, and five, with trimeter in three and six. The sections usually employ end-rhyme, but not in any consistent pattern. It’s a half-crazed form, a black sheep distant cousin of the sonnet, fitting for a protagonist in a state of perpetual crisis. By way of example, consider the opening of Dream Song 29, one of the book’s most famous:

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
So heavy, if he had a hundred years, 
& more, & sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again, always, in Henry’s ears
A little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

Henry’s slings and arrows are many, but there is one “irreversible loss” that Berryman alludes to in a prefatory note to the songs—the suicide of Henry’s father when Henry was a child (Berryman’s actual father indeed died by his own hand). Although that same note insists that Henry is “not the poet, not me,” this claim is of course disingenuous. But whether the songs are sung by Henry or by Berryman himself, it’s been challenging for new generations of readers to cope with the author’s cis-male sense of entitlement, his annexation of African American culture, and his boozy late night pity parties. These qualities have always flummoxed and infuriated a large percentage of Berryman’s audience, and for good reason.

But it’s important to add that a fair number of readers fall hard for The Dream Songs; they’re a smallish cult. I know this because I was a member of it. When Berryman leapt from the Washington Avenue Bridge, I was a freshman at the University of Minnesota, ground zero for Berry-maniac-ism. The drinking age would soon be lowered to eighteen, and my would-be poet friends and I became regulars at The 400, a bar close to campus, one favored by Berryman. There was something of a Berryman shrine above one of the tables, comprised of a framed photo of the poet, and a framed cocktail napkin upon which Berryman purportedly started one of the Songs. A toast to Berryman with our bottles of PBR and Grain Belt became an opening ritual for our semi-secret society meetings.

Poet Shane McCrae is a card-carrying member of this same fellowship, and tasked himself with compiling a collection of Berryman’s unpublished songs. It’s long been known that they exist. Berryman may have had a chaotic personal life, but he kept his literary remains in good order, and the unissued songs reside in boxes twenty-four and twenty-five of the Berryman papers stored in the University of Minnesota Library. With the publication in 1968 of His Toy, His Dream, His Rest—the second volume of the songs—Berryman considered his masterwork to be over and done. He turned to other projects, none of them as singular. But he kept churning out songs. John Haffenden, author of Berryman’s first biography, included forty-five of them in Henry’s Fate, a collection of Berryman’s unpublished poems that was issued in 1977, all of them written after His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, selected and introduced by McCrae, appears to gather earlier songs. (McCrae doesn’t provide us with information about when these outlier songs were written: they’re arranged in the alphabetical order of the first word in the first lines. It would have been helpful to know where these unpublished songs figured in the decade or so of Berryman’s labor on his project, but most of the manuscripts are undated.)

But does Only Sing enhance Berryman’s literary legacy? After all, the book is comprised of work which Berryman didn’t seek to publish. When a posthumous volume of the fiercely private Elizabeth Bishop’s unpublished verse was issued in 2007, there was no work that seriously compared with the poems she chose to include in her collections, though the book confirmed many of the things we already knew about her discernments and writing habits. It’s the same with Only Sing, though further questions that arise from the book’s publication are intriguing ones. 

Most importantly, are we to read The Dream Songs as what McCrae in his introduction claims to be an epic poem, presumably in the grand old-fashioned meaning of the word? Think Vergil; think Dante. Or are we to view the book as simply a funky take on the sonnet sequence, mostly autobiographical and loosely narrative: a display of writerly chops, in other words, and oftentimes of genius? Who but Berryman could dash off a dream song on a cocktail napkin while downing a second or third martini at The 400? Answer affirmatively to these latter questions and Berryman becomes a skilled graphomaniac rather than the composer of an epic—not a Homer, more akin to a writer such as Merrill Moore, the psychiatrist-poet who was Berryman’s contemporary, who achieved the dubious distinction of writing 10,000 sonnets. True, The Dream Songs fiddle with the archetypes of epic heroics: Henry mopes through the first half of the songs in the manner of Achilles brooding in his tent; he sort of dies in the middle of the book, he sort of descends to the underworld, he sort of resurrects himself, and he sort of digs up the grave of his vampiric father, driving an ax through his heart. Ascribe to this interpretation of the songs, and you’ll believe McCrae has it right. Conversely, if you ascribe to the Berryman as dream-song-writing-sausage-factory interpretation, you may also have it right. After all, The Dream Songs can be excerpted: Kevin Young, Daniel Swift, and Michael Hoffman have each edited a Berryman Selected, each with a slightly different representation of the songs. And shortly before his death, Berryman himself prepared a Selected for his British publisher, also including a hefty selection of the songs.  

These questions might have been beside the point if Berryman had only a small number of songs to leave on the cutting room floor, but if you combine the 152 of them that McCrae has selected with the forty-five that Haffenden issued in Henry’s Fate, the number of completed dream songs is now longer by half, and it’s entirely likely that in a few years hence FSG will slap all of them together to form a Complete Dream Songs, much in the way that CD reissues of classic rock and jazz albums get loaded down with outtakes. I hope this will not be the case, as it would further undermine the argument for The Dream Songs as a totalizing epic. If you love Berryman, Only Sing will be a thrilling read, though it should come as no surprise that—with a couple of notable exceptions—its contents are a display of Berryman’s talent rather than of his genius. Berryman’s friend Randall Jarrell, elegized in His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, famously defined a poet as someone who, from a lifetime of standing out in the rain, gets struck by lightning three or four times. You might call Only Sing a gathering of standing-out-in-the-rain poems.

How do they differ from the canonical Dream Songs? Let me offer a few observations.

First, they are generally more “occasional” than the most esteemed of the songs. Many of them start with a scene and a setting: there’s a Thanksgiving song, an Xmas card song, songs about Henry’s consternation with his newborn daughter, songs composed in locked wards while Henry’s drying out, a song about preparing the guest room for a visit for poet buddy William Meredith, and songs of literary gossip whose shelf life has long expired. The best of The Dream Songs seem to take place not so much in an identifiable locale and time, but instead on a bare, spotlit stage, where Henry rages at, in no particular order, God, father, exes, childhood trauma, and his own manifold shortcomings. It’s always the middle of the Dark Night of the Soul. The book is less a series of lyric poems than it is a gathering of dramatic ones with deeply unconventional lyric elements. The nearest comparable work I can think of is a play—Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, a work that also features its protagonist’s bonkers self-elegizing monologue. The occasional songs—and there are also a good number of them in His Toy, His Dream, His Rest—have much less gravitas and inventiveness. Many of the Only Sing efforts have even less. One entitled “Long Distance” manages, in the space of seven lines, to namecheck “the Siegalmans…Saul…Boyd & Maris…Phil & Ellen….” and “Mitzi.” In another, Henry lists the academic positions he has held—he calls them “slogs,” and there are eleven of them, a number impressive to put down on a CV, but perhaps not urgent enough to occasion a song.     

Second, there are a fair number of Only Sing pieces that push Henry’s verbal pyrotechnics into gobbledygook. One of the pleasures of reading The Dream Songs proper is to unpack their lavish Hopkins-ian mannerisms. In Only Sing these qualities can seem inert, obscurity with no payoff. Here’s the opening stanza of one such song:

Beholden, Honey. Held. Of shifting towers,
often, I heard, and was I frightened by
Henry was horrified by—
a shift of towers; when came one stood still.
Them paradoxes…. Drag. When a man has been ill
so long, why… (14).

The alliteration and caesurae come on strong, but to what purpose do they serve? All we have is a very general expression of unease.

Third, there are installments in the new volume that were likely abandoned because they were less successful at treating themes or strategies that appear in the canonical songs. For example, there’s a churlish elegy for Theodore Roethke that starts with envy and ends in solipsism. In contrast, Dream Song 18, entitled “A Strut for Roethke,” is a gracious and spirited homage. “His Fear increased, Henry was on his own…” has the same sort of wounded bravado as Dream Song 1, but none of its majesty. This list could go on.

Finally, there’s a high likelihood that many, if not most, of the songs in McCrae’s selection are first or early drafts. Berryman was decidedly not a first thought/best thought sort of poet: Paul Mariani’s scrupulous biography of the poet offers a detailed description of exactly how grandly—and grandiosely—planned The Dream Songs were. But the form of the songs, once Berryman had his intentions in place, invited improvisation and looney associative leaps, whether on his typewriter or on a cocktail napkin. And clearly there was something liberating about writing songs in the voice of a character who had no filter, no off-switch, no ability to separate tragedy from hilarity. I suspect that as soon as the Henry mask went on, a dopamine rush would follow like a stiff drink.

It’s necessary to express these caveats, but more important to commend Shane McCrae for at long last taking on the task of gathering up more unpublished songs. McCrae assembled them in the most reader-friendly way one could imagine, and he is right to assert that some of the unpublished material could have found a place in the published books. McCrae singles out a handful of them, among them a surprisingly jovial elegy for the poet, and Berryman drinking buddy, Louis MacNeice, and the Thanksgiving poem I’ve previously mentioned. Allow me to close with my own favorite from the new collection. It begins as a kind of ode to the muse of syntax, composed by one of our greatest syntactical disruptors. And it ends, as so many of the finest dream songs do, in a liminal place between life and death, between faithlessness and prayer. In other words, from that sweet spot from which the most haunted and durable of The Dream Songs issue:

“He make their minds blur, with that syntax. Then” 
He make their minds blur, with that syntax. Then
he abandon syntax and he count on tone. 
Then he go underground.
How number come to see him go? Be one,
be two and three. Be wailing, ended. Then
be he without one sound

who was like fond of it, forever. Bright
lift the big sun, in blackness. Roll the moon
thro’ a starless of his grave.
Rise and fall voices infinitely off. Noon
Jumps down the ages with his love, midnight.
Call: survives there to save

Anything, or humps he wholly in sleep?
The flashes of the suicidal race
& whistles of leaving air
To take his tinies out of mind. Now, in space,
for the descenders & songs lost (God is steep)
how can that calm thing care? (33).