The Dream Songs
385 poems in three-stanza, 18-line form following the half-mad, guilt-ridden Henry through booze, lust, grief, and the suicides of friends. Berryman invented a new kind of dramatic monologue; Henry and his unnamed friend who calls him "Mr Bones" create a minstrel show of the self in crisis. Dream Song 14 ("Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.") is the perfect encapsulation of postwar American existential comedy.
Henry's unnamed friend speaks in blackface minstrel dialect, a device that was queasy in 1964 and has not improved with storage; whole songs now read through a flinch. Of the 385, perhaps eighty are essential, and the rest circle the same gin-soaked self-pity in deliberately mangled syntax. Berryman demands you learn a private language. He does not always repay the tuition.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
