The Selected Letters of John Berryman

“I have a crazy new way of writing poems,” John Berryman wrote to illustrator Ben Shahn in January 1956. He had indeed hit on something crazy and new: an 18-line structure he ended up calling his “Dream Songs.” In these works, thought tends to veer and swerve erratically, syntax is warped and logic suspended, and vocabularies and tones are mixed and recombined with wild abandon. Berryman wrote several hundred of these poems, publishing 385 in two volumes: “77 Dream Songs” in 1964, and “His Toy, His Dream, His Rest” in 1968. The first won the Pulitzer Prize, the second the National Book Award.