Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 427 pages. John Berryman's The Dream Songs are perhaps the funniest, saddest, most intricately wrought cycle of poems by an American in the twentieth century. They are also 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 beings at odds with the world. He is lustful; he is depressed. And while Henry is breaking down and cracking up and patching himself together again, Berryman is doing the same thing to the English language, Mild shelf wear, clean copy.
