From “Six American Days and One Night,” a portfolio by David Bowes that appeared in the Spring 1984 issue of The Paris Review.

The United States is a lyric nation. It has a geography suited to epic, and an expanse suited to epic, but it is organized in a lyric way—organizationally, the United States has more in common with Astrophil and Stella than Paradise Lost. Each state is a lyric, and the nation as a whole is a lyric sequence—or, better, a lyric group. That is to say, the United States is many individual poems that can also be understood as one poem. This organizational feature and the resulting constant tension between individual states and the federal government—that the states seem always, even if at times only minimally, to threaten to pull entirely away from the nation—are, I think, among the several reasons that no successful traditional epic poem, no Aeneid, has been produced in the United States (the exception that proves the rule being Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, both traditional epic and anti-epic at once). But John Berryman’s The Dream Songs is an epic.

It has taken me years to realize that The Dream Songs is an epic—and a successful, even great one. For years, I searched for the successful traditional epic I felt certain must have been written by an American, and although I more than once encountered poems that seemed to fit the bill formally, none of them seemed an artistic success to me. Most often, they were let down by their language, which was commonly pedestrian, almost as if it were a secondary or even tertiary concern of their authors. But, of course, the language of an epic poem must be, in its way, as compressed as the language of a lyric poem—and in those moments when it is not compressed, the language must strike the reader as relaxed from compression, and loaded with the certainty of future compression. The language of The Dream Songs is always either compressed or suggestive of compression. The poem has this, and little else, in common with traditional epic.

But The Dream Songs also, of course, features a hero, as epics traditionally do—Henry. In his note included with the complete edition of The Dream Songs, Berryman described Henry, and The Dream Songs as a whole:

Many opinions and errors in the Songs are to be referred not to the character Henry, still less to the author, but to the title of the work … The poem then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (nor 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.

Henry, of course, is no Odysseus, though he more closely resembles Odysseus than all other epic heroes, with the exception of the unnamed protagonist of Dante’s Commedia (indeed, Henry strikes me as a combination of both heroes, but sitting in an armchair, sometimes a desk chair, at the end of a long day, talking, sometimes singing, sometimes shouting, in an otherwise empty room). Henry is an unheroic hero—a heroic hero has in-narrative effects upon the physical world and the people in it; Henry, for the most part, does not. When he does, the reader must take his word for it that he does; he, rather than the narrative of the epic, describes the effects he has. He is, in other words, a twentieth-century white American male, not especially remarkable, the sort of person who doesn’t establish or recover a nation, or parley with angels, or explore hell, but the sort of common person of whom nations are constituted, to whom angels were once commonly believed to minister in small ways, of whom hell was once commonly believed to be full. Henry is a hero for a disenchanted nation, from which once-common beliefs have mostly fled. He does not mourn the disappearance of those beliefs; he has held on to the beliefs he could.

The Dream Songs has no narrative, however, although it features a hero, and it is this lack of a binding narrative that prevented me, and has perhaps prevented others, from recognizing that The Dream Songs is an epic. Just as the United States is an amalgamation of states, The Dream Songs is an amalgamation of lyrics; just as the stories of the states do not melt and vanish into the story of the nation, the lyrics that constitute The Dream Songs do not melt and vanish into it. The states, considered together, give one the idea of the United States, but the single entity that is the United States floats just beyond that idea, whole thanks to the addition of an ineffable element; the individual Songs, considered together, give one an idea of The Dream Songs, but the single entity, the epic, is something more, whole thanks to the additional consideration of Henry as an entity—he is the cover that binds the pages of the book together. And he makes the expansion of the epic with the Songs in the book you are now reading, or hearing, possible.

The Dream Songs is an epic, then, of a representative twentieth-century American mind, and it is important that it is understood to be the mind of a white person. To contemporary readers, Henry’s use of verbal blackface might be off-putting, but it is essential. With Henry’s verbal blackface, Berryman externalizes the racial anxieties of the white, midcentury American. And he seems to do so consciously. As seen above, in his introductory note to The Dream Songs, Berryman made a point of indicating that Henry is white—he wanted his readers to keep that in mind; in the context of the introductory note, he did not allow whiteness to be a default position—and, in his own life, Berryman refused academic jobs in the South because he didn’t like how black people were treated there. I do not here suggest that Berryman was perfectly enlightened with regard to issues of race, but I do believe he recognized race relations as a—perhaps the—central problem for white Americans, the obstacle that the epic hero must think his way through, and I believe he worked to think his way through toward justice.

***

In a 1968 interview with Berryman, Catherine Watson wrote, “Not all the songs about Henry are in the books, Berryman said, but ‘if there is a third volume, it will not take him further. It will be up to the reader to fit those poems in among the published ones.’ ” Berryman understood his epic to be complete, but he did not believe that its completeness could have only one form—although his remark does suggest that it has an established beginning and end; note the phrase, “fit those poems in among.” Only Sing collects 152 possible additions to the epic, each of which is worth reading for its own merits.

Berryman seems to have realized that the Songs he hadn’t included in his complete edition of The Dream Songs would one day be published. In reference to his then unpublished material, he said in a 1967 interview with Elizabeth Nussbaum, “Why should I publish it? I have little need for fame and money at this point. Anyway, somewhere there’s an assistant professor waiting to become an associate professor—and here are my manuscripts.” Apparently, Berryman often contemplated facilitating such an academic transition; he mentions it in other interviews, as well as in Dream Song 373:

will assistant professors become associates

by working on his works?

Although he wondered, he didn’t object. It is often difficult to know whether a deceased author’s unpublished work ought to be published; I think it almost always ought to be, but I can understand why other people think otherwise. However, with regard to Berryman’s unpublished work, there is considerably less ambiguity than one might find with other writers.

And it seems to me the work ought to be published not only because the Songs are good—some of my favorite Berryman poems are in this book, among them “For Louis MacNeice” and the Song beginning “Grim Pilgrims gather: ‘Thanks.’ I give thanks too,” both of which are elegies for friends who were also poets—but also because Berryman is a central poet of his generation. He seems now to reach more readers than his contemporaries, with the possible exception of Elizabeth Bishop. I have seen more people, strangers, reading The Dream Songs in public than any other book of poems. Also—a fact less noted among poets than it ought to have been—every season finale of the HBO show Succession, including the series finale, is titled after a phrase from Berryman’s Dream Song 29.

Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in December.

Shane McCrae’s most recent full-length book is New and Collected Hell, and his most recent chapbook is Two Appearances After the Resurrection. He teaches at Columbia University.