John Berryman's Dream Songs are arguably the funniest, saddest, most intricately wrought cycle of poems by an American in the twentieth century. They are also, more simply, the vibrantly sketched adventures of a uniquely American antihero named Henry. Henry falls in and out of love, and is in and out of the hospital; he sings of joy and desire, and of being at odds with the world. He is lustful; he is depressed.
The collected Dream Songs consists of 385 discrete poems, combining those from 77 Dream Songs, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965, and those from His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969. But for Berryman, Henry lived on. Over the years, the poet wrote more than a hundred additional songs that didn't make it into the various published editions of the songs. As elucidated by Shane McCrae in the introduction to this edition, Berryman hoped that readers might slot these unpublished poems in among the rest.
Only Sing, which includes both finished poems and drafts, isn't merely the scraps left on a cutting room floor; it is a continuation of the epic cycle, an additional set of poems that crack language open, an extension of Berryman's brilliant account of madness shot through with searing insight.
