The work follows the travails of a character named Henry, who bears a striking resemblance to Berryman. But according to
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry: When the first volume,
77 Dream Songs, was misinterpreted as simple autobiography, Berryman wrote in a prefatory note to the sequel, "The poem then, whatever its cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in
blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof." Berryman read some
Dream Songs in an event at the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum with
Robert Lowell in 1963. Some audio survives. Of Henry, he wrote: "People don't like him, and he doesn't like himself. In fact, he doesn't even know what his name is. His name at one point seems to be Henry House, and at another point it seems to be Henry Pussycat. . .He [also] has a 'friend' who calls him Mr. Bones, and I use friend in quotation marks because this is one of the most hostile friends who ever lived." Controversially, this unnamed friend speaks in a Southern, black
dialect and in "blackface", as Berryman indicates, suggesting a kind of literary
minstrelsy.
Kevin Young, an African-American poet who edited a
Selected Poems of Berryman for
Library of America, commented on this issue: [Berryman's] use of "black dialect" is frustrating and even offensive at times, as many have noted, and deserves examination at length. Nonetheless, the poems are, in part, about an American light that is not as pure as we may wish; or whose purity may rely not just on success (the dream) but on failure (the song). . .In turn, the poems are not a song of "myself" but a song of multiple selves. Instead of a cult of personality, we have a clash of personalities—the poems' protagonist Henry speaks not just as "I" but as "he," "we," and "you". . .Berryman relied on the shifting form to explain in part his disparate personalities. . .The voice shifts from high to low, from archaic language to slang, slant rhyme to full, attempting to render something of
jazz or, more accurately, the
blues—devil's music. What emerges and succeeds is something of a sonnet plus some—a devil's sonnet, say (the three sixes stanzas too obvious to be ignored). Berryman's heresy is against the polite
modernism that preceded him. That the poem can let in all sorts of Americanisms—not just Greek, as
Eliot would have it—and not as signs of culture's decay, but of its American vitality, is fearless and liberating. ==
77 Dream Songs==