Poetry, John Berryman, The Dream Songs

Running Head : HENRY FROM 77 DREAM SONGS heat content of canful Berry part s Poem 77 aspiration Songs total heat of bathroom Berryman s Poem 77 Dream SongsJohn Berryman s book 77 Dream Songs was published in 1965 and won the Pulitzer Prize (Moran 2002 . In it he invents the poetic typefaces Henry and Mr . Bones he later added more poems to the sequence until on that point were n early on four hundred poems collected as The Dream SongsAt the heart of the Dream Songs is the character of Henry , who according to Berryman , refers to himself as I , he , and you so that the various parts of his individuation are fluid . They slide , and the reader is made to forecast who is confabulationing to whom . The poem is fundamentally about an ideational character named Henry , a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface , who has suffered an irreversible spill . This raises the important question of how imaginary is Henry and how much the real- liveliness John Berryman he isHenry is indeed John Berryman struggling with his own life , with the whole problem , human , spiritual , call it what you give , of his own identity . He is an imaginary character precisely in the sense of serving as alter self-importance , a braid whereby the poet may look at himself , talk about himself , talk to himself , and be a multifarious record . But , just as with the early Berryman , it is not an self-centered emphasis but rather a question of how I feel in the sense of how a sensitive unmarried feels in response to his own psyche and to the world he inhabits . Henry is John Berryman saying here I am as a man , as the particular implies the public . Henry is interesting he has sheer interestingness , which is of line of descent not to say that every Dream Song succeeds by this standard Henry , in sum , is a graphic but insufficient unifying device .

The question of how imaginary he is , and of how much the real-life John Berryman he is , is important however insofar as the poem creates a nonfunctional tensity . Who would object if Henry was wholly imaginary and one was simply able to see or to cope about a reference to the real-life John Berryman in the poem ? Who would object if Berryman advisedly wrote an autobiographical and perhaps even a confessional poem ? What we care about is only that poem exists beautifully as a poem and yet in the final analysis the device is the poem , and so it is unsettling to lose our sense of the fictional Henry in favor of the quasi-fictional BerrymanIn 77 Dream Songs Henry is essentially a picaresque hero in the ironic means , a comic type who begins as a stump from vaudeville and ends as distinct in his humanity and measly . He is described as a human American man , free , black and forty-one , a man whose basic problem is clearly to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous consequence particularly the outrageous fortune of being black...If you want to sign up a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay

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