The Dream Songs are distracting and distractions. They are His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, as Berryman indicates in the title of the second volume of poems which, together with 77 Dream Songs, form the long work. [In addition to refusing to yield what they are about, Berryman's poems] are distracting in other regards as well, especially in the insistence and self-consciousness from which they proceed. The 385 poems, or songs, draw attention to themselves in every possible way: by their sheer number, by their language, by their range in knowledge, thinking and feeling, and style. The poems build toward an elliptical long poem that seems unwilling to end…. Through the voices assumed in the poems, the poet becomes his own public relations man, as well as a man at the mercy of the public relations of literary reputations. Berryman, who in life could manage a loud speaking voice, finds comparable pitch and volume in many of the dream poems. The poems display the paraphernalia of mikes, broadcasts, spotlights, gramophones, P.A. systems, televisions, radios, telephones, and box-office attractions. Repeatedly, Berryman's voices are scored for bravura and brass. (pp. 49-50)

As the dream songs alternate between manic and depressive maneuvers, perhaps a modern equivalent of Thomas Nashe's "queerly schizophrenic" style, Berryman complicates both extremes by similar, paradoxical impressions. (p. 53)

Berryman composes out of a love which never seems adequate to or in expression. At times, this love takes on the sexual-aesthetic dimensions of the work of Walt Whitman or Hart Crane. Significantly, these poets are among the artists most prominent throughout the dream songs.

"It's a matter of love." But Berryman uses every imaginable device to deflect that fact, however simpler the syntax of the later poems became. The poet gains distance by proceedings that assume the force of a method and a dialectic. The poems … insist upon coming to their world obliquely. The poet distances his material through the persona of Henry and, in turn, through Henry's ability to shift person and voice, face and style; through lending things the impersonality of anecdote and bad joke and tale; and through devoting whole poems or strategic portions of poems to forestalling criticism of The Dream Songs as a long poem.

Berryman also, ironically, achieves distance by "letting out" so much love that a reader or audience has no option at times but to seek invisibility. Pathetic, bathetic moments create their own spaces of reserve, whether or not the poet chooses to point the way back to feeling and however much or little he may feel called on to help. Sometimes, in the course of a poem, Berryman is able to move beyond a heart-rending plea for a "vision of friendlies" to discover a more acceptable and finally more moving lyricism…. At home or abroad, Berryman addresses what is a recurrent dilemma for him as a needy, wanting poet and man.

Berryman's deflection in the dream songs, then, is not what it might first seem. Evasive poetic ways never completely disguise feeling which the poet often gives the impression of trying to skirt. Attempts at evading feeling by using minstrel blackface and impersonal, slangy idioms work both ambiguously and not ambiguously at all: "—You is from hunger, Mr. Bones," Berryman writes in Dream Song no. 76. The very vulnerability and need, intended for denial, not only are admitted but underlined. Vaudeville turns, introduced to create distance, in part bridge that distance and even can conclude by becoming "hellish." Related to this method, Henry's tales, started about someone else, end by being about a first-person Henry: "So. / I am her."… (pp. 53-6)

The distinctiveness of The Dream Songs resides in how the crises in feeling recorded by the poet have to be dealt with, moment by moment, as artfully as the poet knows how…. The poems break off, resume, only to give way to the welling up of new feeling. Recurrently, emotion gives the impression of beginning in medias res…. (pp. 56-7)

"Need" and "love" are among the most insistent words and foci in The Dream Songs. They are as insistent as Lear's "no"s and "nothing"s, and as pathetic as some of the later moments in that play where "need" and "love" also figure so centrally…. Need and love extend beyond the particular contexts to assume dimensions which are archetypal. An urgency appears in these songs which the Short Poems and the Sonnets noticeably lacked. (pp. 57-8)

Considerations of love and need caused Berryman to raise questions that are at once abstract and intensely personal…. In the course of The Dream Songs, Berryman creates more complications about matters of need and love than he can ever begin to untangle. (pp. 58-9)

Berryman assigns to "the concept 'love'" … a weight and an intensity that are inordinate. Such extreme burdens are placed upon love that Berryman significantly surrounds it, as word and as concept, with quotation marks. In the case of the deaths of his father and his friend, Delmore Schwartz, to whose "sacred memory" His Toy, His Dream, His Rest is dedicated, Berryman's love is so overwhelming in what it would give and in what it needs to be sufficient that it almost "dies" from him. The rhetoric proves to be more than a stylistic device. It represents a typical, defining movement in all of Berryman's work. Commonly, in the guise of a negative syntax or dialectic Berryman sets down his most mystical, loving words. (p. 60)

For Berryman, an acknowledgement of "overneeds," the need for "extra love" or "surplus love," causes him not to abandon man in the contradictions that surround him. Instead, Berryman begins where he can begin, with what defines man and makes him unique, his capacity for language and love. Love may not last, and need may linger on. But this does not stop Berryman from loving and "versing." Out of this situation, The Dream Songs proceed, like self-generated love songs or "Valentines." What the poet seeks is the creation of a community of caring friends, men and women who will share with him their talk and love. (pp. 60-1)

That the Dream Songs are love poems becomes most obvious in the lyric-linguistic bias of Berryman's work. In the elegies and "Op. posth." pieces, Berryman insistently links the figure of poet and lover. Love and expression are one. (p. 61)

Versing in The Dream Songs … joins the sexual to the aesthetic. Berryman's numerous memorial poems link the "heart" and "art" of love; his rhyming "heart" and "art" functions as instructively as his "need" and "seed" does in other contexts. The poet-figures Berryman eulogizes in his poems are remembered for writing well, for crafting poems as an act of love. Translators and translations also become, respectively, workers and works of love.

Berryman joins himself in The Dream Songs to poets like W. C. Williams and Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath. These poets, as Berryman views them, also made "a good sound" out of love. That poet-critics like Robert Lowell and William Meredith have written some of the best criticism of Berryman reveals similar connections. Such men entered into the loving, writing community which Berryman so desperately came to depend upon. The community of caring friends which Berryman established in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet between himself and that one poet is infinitely enlarged in The Dream Songs to range more freely among countries, cultures, and centuries; and this community intently seeks comfort in numbers. (pp. 61-2)

Each Dream Song makes a new attempt at expression and love. Berryman never deceives himself about the labor involved. He knows the risky attractiveness of silence and refuses to turn The Dream Songs into dejection odes…. But this is the Berryman of The Dream Songs; the later poems and books and suicide are still to come. (p. 62)

Berryman draws our attention [to the link between] that of art and of love.

Whether Berryman's poetic expression in The Dream Songs will be adequate merges into fears for his sexual potency. Mikes, gramophones, telephones, pens, and pencils link the instrument of expression or communication with phallic strength and length. Berryman's Henry alternately boasts and fears for his sexual-aesthetic self…. In the course of The Dream Songs no humor is too indecorous for Berryman, whose habit of sexual punning becomes notorious: "whole," "country," "come," "lay," "piece," "stub point," "Venus." But Berryman's puns seldom are indulgent. They often return the reader to what is an important center in the poems. "Venus" can be both Goddess of Love and brand of pencil. "Lay" can be both song and "lovely fuck." Berryman manages to pass so effortlessly from love to art or from woman to poem that the two continually merge, sometimes happily, into one…. (p. 63)

In some very intimate way, Berryman may remind the reader of the Calvinist who, although finally uncertain of salvation, must go on to act as if he were to be among the saved. Berryman wrote The Dream Songs, aware of the contradictions and ambiguities of man and of man's art…. [The] cost involved in that effort helps to explain the continuing distractions along the way: the quirky syntax, extreme topical references and the range of styles included in the poems. (p. 64)

"The horror of unlove." To move from "unlove" to love—this is what these poems are all about. The prefix "un-" recurs throughout the poems. It proves symptomatic both of how the poems proceed and how they must be read (unread?)…. But, even more important, it is symbolic of the kinds of seemingly contractory movements and maneuvers which take place in so many of the poems. (p. 65)

Lyric by loving lyric, The Dream Songs proceed. As separate poems. Yet in the process, Berryman simultaneously moves toward the creation of a long poem, the long poem to the extent that his intentions, ambition, and craft will allow. The second volume of the songs, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, reveals increasing attention given to the progress and process of what Berryman has chosen to take on. The procedure assumes the enormity of a life work in art. (p. 66)

Berryman places himself in that long line of American poets who also wrote long poems: Whitman, Crane, Pound, Eliot Stevens and Williams. Pound's "MAKE IT NEW" and Williams's "Invent" consciously figure in Berryman's long poem…. (p. 68)

Berryman's concern in writing a long American poem determines many concerns within the work. These are concerns which both join him to and separate him from the poet of the Cantos. Berryman reveals in The Dream Songs several things: a large fund of Puritanical guilt; a search for an adequate tradition and for ancestors; a preoccupation with "know-how" and with the "labour" that never seems to get done…. Work, for Berryman, the born Catholic, amounts to nothing less than Puritan exorcism and prayer.

Berryman complicates a particularly American thrust in the poem by an extension of his work not only to a European and Western humanistic past, but to an Eastern culture he finds attractive as a sensibility and as an art form. (p. 69)

What Berryman seems to intend for The Dream Songs is the stature of a work that can manage national and international naive and elitist styles…. How the poem should be judged became an obsessive concern for Berryman. Sections of poems hammer away at the would-be critic…. In the Sonnets, Berryman had also seen the problems involved in the ability or inability of criticism to handle innovative, long works…. (p. 70)

Berryman's ambitions for The Dream Songs as epic work raise considerations not unlike those of Williams's Paterson or Lowell's Life Studies or Notebook poems. In all these works, there are epic dimensions, just as there are narrative, satiric, and dramatic modes. Yet, in the end, it is as lyric or lyric sequences that these poems most profoundly proceed and succeed, if they succeed at all.

Despite Berryman's use of "Books" and some of the machinery of epic, his long poem continually makes its way and creates its impact by means of lyrical images of loss and love. Successful individual poems stand more autonomously than Berryman might have intended. Lyric power is most in evidence, while Berryman struggles with the epic unity of the work. (pp. 70-1)

The lyrical center of The Dream Songs, once located, brings with it considerable problems for the poet and for the reader. The intensities and compressions which involve Berryman commonly result in creating an impression of an impersonal, lyric voice. As with Berryman's ambitions for The Dream Songs as epic work, his lyricism runs the risk of pushing language more and more to the foreground at the expense of whatever was to be done or said or sung.

Part of Berryman's dilemma in his long poem derives from a continuing attempt to move toward some pure, ultimate song…. (p. 71)

The attraction to some kind of final poetry Berryman often expresses in analogies from music and painting, definitively nonverbal media. And, beyond that, he links such poetry with those moments or achievements in music and painting which seem to him most extreme in their accomplishment, the accomplishment of notes or brush-strokes almost beyond the human reaches of art—the particular intensities of Mozart and Beethoven, Van Gogh and Renoir. Berryman knows the costly effort of his undertaking and of the undertaking of all major, absolute art….

Berryman's program for The Dream Songs is at once inclusive and exclusive. It is exclusive in its content and in the elitist, Yeatsean audience it imagines. It is inclusive to the point of having Berryman wish nothing or no one, living or dead, escape from the work. This inclusiveness, instead of being comforting, turns into a nightmare of proliferation where, after endless ledgering, Berryman lets no one go…. (p. 72)

The risks of language replacing life never disperse themselves completely in The Dream Songs…. At times, instead of reverting to Berryman, the construct which we encounter as The Dream Songs looks like an inadequate, deflective substitute for life…. It is not that Berryman is unaware of the dangers of an implicit, marginal decadence. The humor he can manage in its face can be considerable…. But in many of the … songs there is less of a conscious, real struggle between the claims of art and life. Too often pen threatens to replace penis. Love and life tend to be kept at too comfortable and safe a distance. What begins as a humorous retelling of a story barely hides what is occurring, namely art replacing sex as source and organ…. (pp. 73-4)

In The Dream Songs Berryman's language frequently suffers from the masturbatory indulgence we meet in characters and in the language of characters, in Genet and Albee, in Bellow and Salinger and Roth. (p. 74)

Berryman, by giving language a more and more prominent place in his work, necessarily commits himself to the risks of leaving out or obscuring feeling. It is that fund of feeling which major poetry must somehow manage to embrace. From the Sonnets to The Dream Songs, Berryman's "words," or "mots," "fly," The Sonnets, although written about an actual affair, exceed the sonneteers' conventional attention to his poor, inadequate art. And The Dream Songs turn a traditional concern of the poet with language into an obsessive, even pathological motif. In theory, the world which Berryman wishes to create in his long poem sounds at once reasonable and ambitious: "the construction of a world rather than the reliance upon one which is available to a small poem."… [Yet, Berryman's plan for his long poem looks] like an apology for a decadent aesthetics: life existing and aiming to end in a book.

Just as Berryman deftly passes back and forth between the realms of life and art, so at times he moves toward the establishment of a "style" that is "black jade," a potentially decadent lyric-elegiac mode. In The Dream Songs, Berryman is fond not only of "style" as word, but of style, styles, and stylists, as question and meaning…. Berryman is aware of a defining style he needs to work out for himself, and, in the case of The Dream Songs, for his long poem.

The most triumphant of The Dream Songs manage to find that music, a style which can be austere or grand, austere and grand at the same time. (pp. 75-6)

In a very basic sense, what The Dream Songs evidences is an unending preparation for death or, more specifically, for executing a death-style adequate to artful dying…. (p. 78)

Love & Fame, published in 1970, soon after The Dream Songs, offers the same distractions and dangers of that long work: a linguistic center which is potentially evasive, an incipient elegiac decadence, and the sustained impression of a posthumous, prophetic book. And it was not long before Delusions, Etc. and the novel Recovery appeared, not as metaphorically posthumous books but as literally posthumous facts.

As with The Dream Songs, Berryman lends to this new book the force of a stock-taking which becomes part of an artistic and spiritual biography executed before a reader's eyes. At worst, this stock-taking degenerates into another Advertisements for Myself or another Making It, very much in the American grain.

At a very basic and obvious level, Berryman attempts in Love & Fame to address what comes after love and after fame (which he sometimes calls "after-fame")…. Also, in the new book he seeks a unity of its own, moving more or less chronologically back to his prep school days, Columbia College, graduate school in England at "the other Cambridge," and up to his days as an established poet. But whatever differences and distance he seeks to establish in this new volume may in the end be superficial. More ghosts, technical and spiritual, linger on in Love & Fame than Berryman might have wanted to admit.

Love & Fame reveals familiar Berryman country. Again, there is the poet's need for caring, loving friends or "confrères"; again, the obsession with deaths and suicides of friends, writers, and fathers; again, Berryman's fears for art and love. (pp. 78-9)

[But in Love & Fame] he is a man even closer to mortality, more profoundly aware of his own eventual death. (p. 79)

Love & Fame ostensibly moves in its last section, made up of "Eleven Addresses to the Lord," to an art of praise, from the love and fame recorded in the earlier sections to a love of God the Father, in a style complexly echoic of Donne and Herbert and Hopkins. But these addresses, concerned with praise, reveal less sureness of first and last things than he would have liked them to.

What happens in the last section of Love & Fame, at least what happens to part of Berryman as he records that part in art, is the expression of a confessional need for a Pauline persona or protagonist. (pp. 79-80)

If anywhere at all in Love & Fame, it is in the third section that Berryman writes poems closer to what I consider major Berryman. These poems keep before a reader what the too casual poems of the first two sections and which the willfully sure, tensionless poems of the last section avoid—that horror of unlove which The Dream Songs made into a defining music. (p. 81)

[For example, the] short poem "Despair" is one of the longest, slowest, most agonizing poems Berryman ever wrote. The other better poems in the third section of Love & Fame, which happen also to be the best poems in the book, "The Search," "Message," "Antitheses," "Of Suicide," proceed as unflinchingly as "Despair." And they comprise the poems which show the most awareness of the dramatic situation behind the book….

Berryman was most successful and most recognizably Berryman when he was uneasy about the intimate, intricate alignments among life, fame, art, love, death, lyric, and elegy. Love & Fame is no exception. In this book, his poems still are his "lovelies." His lyrics still are, in a repeated phrase from the book, "deathwords & sayings in crisis." (p. 84)

Berryman's posthumously published work—his book of poems, Delusions, Etc. and his uncompleted novel, Recovery—only confirm directions and dangers which I noted in earlier volumes…. What we witness in Love & Fame is the same irony and pity which distinguished The Dream Songs but with more pity and less irony than we had seen before…. The complexities of lyric, elegy, blues, ballad, minstrelsy, and vaudeville dwindle to something less than art.

If in Love & Fame Berryman did not "entirely resign," he calls one of his poems in Delusions, Etc. "He Resigns." If in Love & Fame he still saw the Blues (and, by extension, poetry as the Blues) as "the most promising mutual drama," Recovery descends to A.A. group therapy, which makes the possibility of recovery seem one more delusion along the way. The titles of the two posthumous books are almost beyond irony. Delusions, Etc. suggests in its second word the will toward some movement counter to delusion as much as it suggests pure physical, psychological, and artistic exhaustion and spiritual despair. And Recovery gives the lie to the emergence of recovery on every page of the book.

Both books are undistinguished. Delusions, Etc. has several fine poems in it,, "Washington in Love," "Beethoven Triumphant," "Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion," "He Resigns," "Henry's Understanding," "Defensio in Extremis," but most of the poems are thin and artless. Recovery is helplessly, relentlessly bad; Berryman not only was unable to disguise his biography but unable to find the art necessary for any novel at all. Berryman falling apart—drinking himself to death, engaging in failed loving encounters, harboring incestuous desires, fouling himself behind, finding fame the last infirmity or delusion of mind—is the spectacle we never are allowed to bypass or forget. Berryman the man and writer come more and more together, ironically as Berryman comes more and more apart.

Motifs from the earlier books continue—the endless need for "the lovely men" or "unloseable friends," for love in all its forms against loss. (pp. 86-7)

The problem facing the critic in Delusions, Etc. and Recovery, even if he tries to forget that the books are posthumous and that Berryman finally killed himself, is that the books are full of contradictory impressions. Berryman wants to live and to die. He wants to move from lay artist to Catholic layman at the same time we wonder about his "layman's winter mockup." He wants to move to the love of the Virgin and Christ as the God of Love, while he knows that God the Father and Christ the Son have to be One. And it is easy to transpose…. But the problem, as Recovery so chillingly sets it forth, is that the saying or hearing of "I love you" … evokes in Berryman the most terrifying feelings of all. In part, Berryman's horror of unlove is as much Berryman's horror of love, love too good to be believed….

The poems in Delusions, Etc., like the Twelve Steps of A.A. in Recovery, finally prove "maladaptive devices" for the poet and protagonist. (p. 88)

The Dream Songs managed to suggest that there might be another method or music if only the poet could find those loving sounds. By the time of the writing of "He Resigns," however, probably the best and most significant poem in Delusions, Etc., Berryman had written a poem which looked back to poems like "Snow Line" and "Despair" at the same time that it moved closer to that final dejection ode and its accompanying exhaustion which Berryman had tried so hard to stave off…. (pp. 88-9)

Arthur Oberg, "John Berryman: 'The Dream Songs' and the Horror of Unlove," in The University of Windsor Review (reprinted by permission), Vol. 6, No. 1, Fall, 1970 (and reprinted in a different form as "John Berryman: 'The Horror of Unlove'," in his Modern American Lyric: Lowell, Berryman, Creeley, and Plath, Rutgers University Press, 1978, pp. 49-92).