A wild, masterful Pulitzer Prize-winning cycle of poems that half a century later still shocks and astounds John Berryman was hardly unknown when he published 77 Dream Songs , but the volume was, nevertheless, a shock and a revelation. 77 Dream Songs won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, but Berryman\'s formal and emotional innovations-he cracks the language open, creates a new idiom in which to express eternal feelings-remain as alive and immediate today as ever..
Henry, afraid of his own violent urges, consoles himself: Nobody is ever missing. / Then came a departure.
Henry despairs: All the world like a woolen lover / once did seem on Henry\'s side.
Henry lusts: seeing a woman Filling her compact & delicious body / with chicken p prika he can barely restrain himself: only the fact of her husband & four other people / kept me from springing on her.
And while the most famous of the Dream Songs begins, Life, friends, is boring, these poems never are.
Henry may not be real, but he comes alive on the page.
Bones: We touch at certain points, Berryman claimed, of Henry, But I am an actual human being.
Berryman had also discovered his most enduring alter ego, a paranoid, passionate, depressed, drunk, irrepressible antihero named Henry or, sometimes, Mr.
As Henri Cole notes in his elegant, perceptive introduction, Berryman had discovered a looser style that mixed high and low dictions with a strange syntax.
A spooky collection in the words of Robert Lowell-a maddening work of genius.
A wild, masterful Pulitzer Prize-winning cycle of poems that half a century later still shocks and astounds John Berryman was hardly unknown when he published 77 Dream Songs , but the volume was, nevertheless, a shock and a revelation
