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A web of loss: The contextualized persona in John Berryman's "Dream Songs"
Abstract
In The Dream Songs, John Berryman crafts an epic hero who comes to a tentative acceptance of his personal experience of loss. Berryman brings to the text various traditional forms as he blends the autobiographical with the traditional, thus structuring a persona, Henry, who is a modernist innovation enriched by a contextual invention. Berryman wraps his modern sensibility around traditional motifs and forms such as the epic and the elegy. He employs unique syntactical and grammatical constructions to present an original voice of a man diminished by both this 'sickening century' and his own "horrors of unlove," yet who is willing to nurture "heavy daughters" (both literary and literal) and modern poetry.^ Bo Gustavsson argues that Henry operates as an imaginative extension of Berryman's life and personality, thereby providing a testimony of the life of a modern man. The Dream Songs extend beyond the autobiographical context through their use of other poets' influences and poetic forms.^ Berryman draws on a variety of tradition for his modern epic poem. The Dream Songs has Homerian, Virgilian, and Dantean elements in both its content and style, and employs a long sonnet influenced by Hopkins's experiments with the genre. Berryman does not confine himself to only one source or to only one scheme; the modern consciousness will not allow such singleness of structure. The Songs are a dramatic monologue with an internal interlocutor to act as Henry's alter ego. Numerous elegies (some in the epic encomium tradition) lament the passing of major twentieth-century literary figures to highlight Henry's Prufrockian fear of death and insignificance (seen in his own personal, albeit premature, elegies). Berryman weaves numerous elegies to his father that serve thematically as the prominent connecting thread in the poem. An examination of the above influences will show how Berryman lifts his poem out of the confines of his own personal experience and misery into a world separate from, but parallel to, the twentieth-century American's experience. ^
Subject Area
Literature, American
Recommended Citation
Dodson, Samuel Fisher, "A web of loss: The contextualized persona in John Berryman's "Dream Songs"" (1995). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9611047.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9611047