The Dream Songs

Like I suppose Berryman, were they sort of sonnets? I can't remember.

The Dream Songs.

Yeah.

They're sort of sonnet-ish.

He's an academic.

These Dream Songs are kind of like sonnets, but having said that, as somebody that's never written myself with a strict form in mind, but as somebody who readily acknowledges the liberating aspect of form because it forces you into certain positions and rhythms, as we see in this poem, that can be different and more magnificent than regular speech, where you have no laws about it.

You have grammar, but not really, not in spoken speech.

I've just been reading some Marshall McLuhan when I've been here.

But as a high schooler, I think I understood that I was coming out of the Eden of childhood, in a way, and having these complicated thoughts, more complicated thoughts than I'd had as a child.

And not that I would've put it into words that I just put it in now, but there was a loss involved that was moving to me.

The volume that I read in high school, these Dream Songs, there were 77.

I remember the similar vibe where Henry is just feeling guilty about something, and he thinks, "Oh, it's like I've murdered somebody and hacked them up and hid the pieces where they can't be found." And then he says, "Often he reckons in the dawn them up nobody's ever missing." And so he has this guilt, again, original sin.

And not that I would have put it in words that I just put it in now, but there was a loss involved that was moving to me.

The volume that I read in high school, these Dream Songs, there were 77.

I remember the similar vibe where Henry is just feeling guilty about something and he thinks, "Oh, it's like I've murdered somebody and hacked them up and hid the pieces where they can't be found." And then he says, "Often he reckons in the dawn them up nobody's ever missing." And so he has this guilt, again, original sin.

He feels like a murderer, but everybody's here.

But another candidate for the group is John Berryman, who was already a celebrated poet by March 1957 when his son Paul was born.

Over the following eighteen months, Berryman suffered, he said, from an inability to stop writing verse, and he remade his style and produced a great rush of the curious, brilliant poems later called his dream songs.

Of the group, Robert Lowell is perhaps the purest example of a father poet, because of his enormous skill, and the drama of his life, and because the change in his own style is so stark.

At first, Lowell wrote like this, i saw the spiders marching through the air swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day in latter august when the hay and like this when we were children our papas were stout and colourless as seaweed or the floats at anchor off new bedford we were shut in gardens where our brassy sailor coats The two poems quoted here are taken from his collection Lord Weary's Castle, 1946, which was published when he was 29.