Dreams and Nightmares, by Rosanna Warren

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July 2026 Issue

[Reviews]

Dreams and Nightmares

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John Berryman’s fresh idiom

by Rosanna Warren ,

Discussed in this essay:

Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, by John Berryman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 192 pages. $28.

John Berryman, May 1, 1967 © Mark Kauffman/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In 1935, when John Berryman was an undergraduate at Columbia University, he encountered an essay by the critic R. P. Blackmur in Poetry. Thirty-five years later, in “Olympus”—one of the best poems in his creaky late collection Love and Fame—Berryman recalled the first sentence of that review, now lineated as free verse:

‘The art of poetry

is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse

by the animating presence in the poetry

of a fresh idiom: language

so twisted & posed in a form

that it not only expresses the matter in hand

but adds to the stock of available reality.’

I was never altogether the same man after that.

Berryman took Blackmur’s words as his marching orders and his credo. Until his suicide in 1972, he wrote contorted, hysterical, dense, madcap-funny, desperate, erudite, and at times offensive poems. It was Berryman, more than his Beat contemporaries, who crashed through the New Critical proprieties that dominated American poetry in the Fifties. With his deeply schooled wildness (he was a formidable scholar of Shakespeare), Berryman blasted open the language of poetry, much as his friend Saul Bellow enlarged the reaches of prose fiction. In Berryman’s masterpiece, The Dream Songs, taboos and inhibitions topple; the unspeakable is given tongue. These are dream songs, after all, and often nightmares.

Berryman published the first installment, 77 Dream Songs, in 1964. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry the following year. In 1968, he expanded the corpus with a second, much larger collection, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, earning the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1969. The complete Dream Songs (as it existed then) came out that same year: three hundred and eighty-five poems, with the escapades and tirades of Berryman’s alter ego, Henry (also called Mr. Bones), at their center. By then, Berryman’s alcoholism was racing neck and neck with his creative drive and his phenomenal, though temporary, resilience. Henry and his maker thrashed in and out of hospitals, marriages, and adulteries while continuing to teach, to drink, to rove the world giving readings, and even to write. The miracle was that they both—Berryman and Henry—endured so long, and that Berryman, for twenty-odd years, kept producing his savagely original poems: “not quite forgiveless, feverless, our / hero arose, held, in pieces.”

Berryman’s great achievement was the creation of what Blackmur had called a fresh idiom. He twisted syntax in a fashion so wholly his own that he became an idiosyncrat on the scale of Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom he revered. There are dangers in idiosyncrasy: Style may degenerate into mannerism; poems may founder in obscurity. But Berryman was willing to risk such things to get to the heart of his matter.

In “Dream Song 366,” Henry advises,

These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand.

They are only meant to terrify & comfort.

Lilac was found in his hand.

These lines distill Berryman’s genius, boiling together paradox, contradiction, and non sequitur, and recondensing them into a series of truths about art: that its power lies beyond rational understanding, that it is cathartic (“terrify & comfort”), and, of course, that it can destroy its maker (“Lilac was found . . . ”). Now, more than a half century since his death, we have the arrival of Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, which the poet Shane McCrae has quarried from the Berryman papers at the University of Minnesota. What can we learn from the orphaned poems of so wild and singular a poet?

The poet we know as John Berryman was born in 1914 in McAlester, Oklahoma, bearing his father’s name: John Allyn Smith Jr. His father worked in regional banks around Oklahoma before moving the family to Tampa, Florida, when John Jr. was around eleven. There, his parents and maternal grandmother set up a restaurant with money from the sale of his grandmother’s land. Within a few months, though, the Florida real-estate boom collapsed, and the restaurant soon shuttered. John Jr.’s mother began an affair with their landlord, an older businessman named John Angus Berryman. In short order, John Allyn Sr. shot himself and Mrs. Smith married Mr. Berryman, who sent his own wife packing. “Thrift, thrift, Horatio,” Hamlet explained in the play that would haunt John Berryman all his life. “The funeral baked meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.”

The new couple, Mr. and Mrs. Berryman, moved the family to New York City, and John Allyn Smith Jr. became John Berryman. The tortured plot of...