{"id":171557,"date":"2025-09-04T10:00:33","date_gmt":"2025-09-04T14:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=171557"},"modified":"2025-09-04T10:09:29","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T14:09:29","slug":"a-lyric-nation-on-the-uncollected-dream-songs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/09\/04\/a-lyric-nation-on-the-uncollected-dream-songs\/","title":{"rendered":"A Lyric Nation: On the Uncollected Dream Songs"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

From “Six American Days and One Night,” a portfolio by David Bowes that appeared in the Spring 1984 issue of The Paris Review.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

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\u2014organizationally, the United States has more in common with Astrophil and Stella <\/em>than Paradise Lost<\/em>. Each state is a lyric, and the nation as a whole is a lyric sequence\u2014or, 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\u2014that the states seem always, even if at times only minimally, to threaten to pull entirely away from the nation\u2014are, I think, among the several reasons that no successful traditional epic poem, no Aeneid<\/em>, has been produced in the United States (the exception that proves the rule being Alice Notley\u2019s The Descent of Alette<\/em>, both traditional epic and anti-epic at once). But John Berryman\u2019s The Dream Songs <\/em>is an epic.<\/p>\n

It has taken me years to realize that The Dream Songs <\/em>is an epic\u2014and 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\u2014and in those moments when it is not <\/em>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 <\/em>is always either compressed or suggestive of compression. The poem has this, and little else, in common with traditional epic.<\/p>\n

But The Dream Songs <\/em>also, of course, features a hero, as epics traditionally do\u2014Henry. In his note included with the complete edition of The Dream Songs<\/em>, Berryman described Henry, and The Dream Songs <\/em>as a whole:<\/p>\n

\n

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 \u2026 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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\u2019s Commedia<\/em> (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\u2014a 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

The Dream Songs <\/em>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 <\/em>is an epic. Just as the United States is an amalgamation of states, The Dream Songs <\/em>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 <\/em>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<\/em>, but the single entity, the epic, is something more, whole thanks to the additional consideration of Henry as an entity\u2014he 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.<\/p>\n

The Dream Songs <\/em>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\u2019s use of verbal blackface might be off-putting, but it is essential. With Henry\u2019s 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<\/em>, Berryman made a point of indicating that Henry is white\u2014he 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\u2014and, in his own life, Berryman refused academic jobs in the South because he didn\u2019t 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\u2014perhaps the<\/em>\u2014central problem for white Americans, the <\/em>obstacle that the epic hero must think his way through, and I believe he worked to think his way through toward justice.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In a 1968 interview with Berryman, Catherine Watson wrote, \u201cNot all the songs about Henry are in the books, Berryman said, but \u2018if 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.\u2019 \u201d Berryman understood his epic to be complete, but he did not believe that its completeness could have only one form\u2014although his remark does suggest that it has an established beginning and end; note the phrase, \u201cfit those poems in among.\u201d Only Sing <\/em>collects 152 possible additions to the epic, each of which is worth reading for its own merits.<\/p>\n

Berryman seems to have realized that the Songs he hadn\u2019t included in his complete edition of The Dream Songs <\/em>would one day be published. In reference to his then unpublished material, he said in a 1967 interview with Elizabeth Nussbaum, \u201cWhy should I publish it? I have little need for fame and money at this point. Anyway, somewhere there\u2019s an assistant professor waiting to become an associate professor\u2014and here are my manuscripts.\u201d Apparently, Berryman often contemplated facilitating such an academic transition; he mentions it in other interviews, as well as in Dream Song 373:<\/p>\n

\n

will assistant professors become associates<\/p>\n

by working on his works?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Although he wondered, he didn\u2019t object. It is often difficult to know whether a deceased author\u2019s 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\u2019s unpublished work, there is considerably less ambiguity than one might find with other writers.<\/p>\n

And it seems to me the work ought to be published not only because the Songs are good\u2014some of my favorite Berryman poems are in this book, among them \u201cFor Louis MacNeice\u201d and the Song beginning \u201cGrim Pilgrims gather: \u2018Thanks.\u2019 I give thanks too,\u201d both of which are elegies for friends who were also poets\u2014but 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 <\/em>in public than any other book of poems. Also\u2014a fact less noted among poets than it ought to have been\u2014every season finale of the HBO show Succession<\/em>, including the series finale, is titled after a phrase from Berryman\u2019s Dream Song 29.<\/p>\n

\n

***<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

At the beginning of John Haffenden\u2019s introduction to the volume he edited of late poems not included in Berryman\u2019s final books (that volume, currently out of print but not difficult to find used or in libraries, is titled\u00a0<\/span>Henry\u2019s Fate<\/em>), one encounters the following sentences: \u201cThis volume of poems, written between 1967 and 1972 \u2026 represents only a fraction of Berryman\u2019s unpublished and uncollected work. There are several hundred unpublished Dream Songs, and as many more miscellaneous poems.\u201d Although I had first read\u00a0<\/span>Henry\u2019s Fate<\/em>\u00a0<\/i><\/span>over a decade ago, it wasn\u2019t until reading it again in 2023 that I realized the \u201cseveral hundred unpublished Dream Songs, and as many more miscellaneous poems\u201d hadn\u2019t yet been collected, and upon that realization, of course, I tweeted about it, expressing a wish that somebody would collect the unpublished Songs and poems. Soon after I posted that tweet, Christopher Richards, who had edited my memoir, emailed me to suggest I edit a volume of unpublished Berryman myself. The idea first seemed absurd to me, then terrifying, then possible\u00a0<\/span>and<\/em>\u00a0<\/i><\/span>absurd\u00a0<\/span>and<\/em>\u00a0<\/i><\/span>terrifying, and I set about trying to make the idea a book. In December of 2025, that book, Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs<\/i>, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Two of the Songs<\/a> from the book appear in the Summer 2025 issue of The Paris Review<\/i>.<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

But I\u2019m getting ahead of myself. In November of 2023\u2014on the anniversary, although I didn\u2019t know it at the time, of the date on which Berryman wrote Dream Song 29\u2014I flew to Minneapolis for a daylong visit to the Andersen Library Reading Room at the University of Minnesota. There, Erin McBrien, then the interim curator, located the boxes of Berryman\u2019s unpublished material and patiently answered all my questions, and I photographed each of the manuscripts of the unpublished Dream Songs. The next day, I flew home and began transcribing the Songs. Doing so, I made no effort to Americanize Berryman\u2019s spelling\u2014he studied for two years at Clare College, Cambridge, and often favored British spelling\u2014and I left the entirely idiosyncratic spellings and words untouched (one example of the latter: the word sieteus<\/em> in the poem beginning \u201cHearkened Henry,\u201d which perhaps ought to be she tells<\/em>, but is, in fact, sieteus<\/em> in Berryman\u2019s typescript). I corrected only obvious typos. Once the Songs were transcribed, I had to determine how to arrange them, and I settled upon ordering them alphabetically according to first line. I could not organize them chronologically, because most of them hadn\u2019t been dated by the poet and I didn\u2019t want to guess\u2014my goal was to impose as little of my own will as possible upon the organization of the Songs. However, I have made two exceptions: there are two short sequences of Songs among the Songs collected in Only Sing<\/i>, one titled \u201cFour Dream Songs,\u201d and one an incomplete group of Songs, each of which is titled \u201cIdyl.\u201d Each group I placed alphabetically according to the first line of the first poem in the group. Although it was Berryman\u2019s practice, when collecting the Dream Songs into books, to group the Songs in numbered sections, I haven\u2019t done so, as to do so would be to impose the will I\u2019m trying to minimize. These Songs are put together in the way that I hope best allows\u2014or at least allows as well as any other way\u2014readers to \u201cfit [them] in among\u201d the already existing Songs, so that each reader might expand the epic according to their own wishes, thereby laying claim to their particular sense of what\u00a0<\/span>The Dream Songs<\/em>\u00a0<\/i><\/span>is.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs<\/a> will be published by<\/em> Farrar, Straus and Giroux\u00a0in December.<\/em><\/p>\n

Shane McCrae\u2019s most recent full-length book is<\/em> New and Collected Hell, and his most recent chapbook is<\/em> Two Appearances After the Resurrection. He teaches at Columbia University. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe 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\u2014organizationally, the United States has more in common with Astrophil and Stella than Paradise Lost.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1952,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Lyric Nation: On the Uncollected Dream Songs by Shane McCrae<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 4, 2025 \u2013 \u201cThe United States is a lyric nation. 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