A Study Guide for John Berryman's "Dream Song 29"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for John Berryman's "Dream Song 29," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535822176

Book preview

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Dream Song 29

John Berryman

1964

Introduction

Dream Song 29, by American poet John Berryman, was first published in 77 Dream Songs in 1964. The collection was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Several years later, Berryman published more dream songs in His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968). Taken together, the two volumes contain 385 dream songs and can be read as one long poem. The central character in the dream songs is named Henry. He is a semi-autobiographical figure. Berryman denied that Henry was a version of himself, but critics have taken his denials with a pinch of salt. In his note on the dream songs that appeared in The Dream Songs, a one-volume edition of all the dream songs that was first published in 1969, Berryman commented on the songs as a whole: The poem … 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. This loss endured by Henry, which many critics assume to be the suicide of Berryman's father, forms a background to Dream Song 29, in which Henry confesses to a constant feeling of sorrow and guilt and falsely imagines that he has committed a murder. It is one of the most accessible of the dream songs, some of which are obscure, their meaning difficult to puzzle out. Taken as a whole, Berryman's dream songs are his most enduring work and represent a significant contribution to American poetry in the second part of the twentieth