77 Dream Songs

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A01=John Berryman
American Poets
American Psyche
Author_John Berryman
Category=DCF
confessional poets
cult collection
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
forthcoming
iconic
Nick Cave
poets and alcohol

Product details

  • ISBN 9780571400225
  • Dimensions: 153 x 204mm
  • Publication Date: 13 Aug 2026
  • Publisher: Faber & Faber
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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This edition of 77 Dream Songs faithfully replicates the iconic jacket, format and setting of the first edition, published in 1964.

'The poem then, whatever its wide 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. Resquiescant in pace.' John Berryman

Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law
Against Henry.
-Mr Bones: there is.
(Dream Song 4)

'All is risk and variety here. This great Pierrot's universe is more tearful and funny than we can easily bear. . . No voice now or persona sticks in my ear as his. It is poignant, abrasive, anguished, humorous . . .' Robert Lowell

John Berryman (1914-72) was a poet from an immensely gifted generation of American poets that included Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth Bishop. His long sequence The Dream Songs (of which 77 Dream Songs was the first part) has become an enduring landmark in American poetry and a tribute to Berryman's own endurance in the face of alcoholism, depression and mental instability. In 1972 he leaped to his death from a bridge above the Mississippi River.

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