Berryman has said that it took him two years to get over the writing of his "Bradstreet" poem, first published in [1953]…. He began work (or planning), then,… and lived with the creation of The Dream Songs [some thirteen years]. (p. 246)

The mid-1950s, then, was a critical moment in Berryman's career. It was at this time that he made the decision to remake himself as a poet, to give over the Eliotic kind of impersonal or "made" poetry that he had previously written and to launch a personal epic with an open-ended structure in the Whitmanian (or "orbic-flex") manner and tradition. His enthusiastic 1957 essay on "Song of Myself," with its extravagant praise of Whitman, provides an indirect account of his own poetic turmoil in change.

But it is The Dream Songs that provides the spiritual history of that remaking of the poetic self. The epic is in the broadest sense about Berryman's personal transfiguration from one kind of poet to another. As a newly committed personal poet, Berryman felt able for the first time in his poetry to confront the personal events of his life—as, for example, the earlier suicide of his father. The poetic remaking of the self, then, was in a sense a move to come to terms with the battering events of a difficult life.

Berryman's form, the interior "dream song," enables him to scramble chronology at will (as in a dream). But there is running throughout this work a recognizable "contemporary time" paralleling the time of the writing of the songs, roughly 1955–68, a period that provides the basic frame. But many poems break out of this frame into various levels of the past, treating those events that continue to haunt the poet.

Moreover, The Dream Songs has a symmetry of form in spite of its chaotic appearance. The first three books (77 Dream Songs) look back from the "contemporary time" frame to focus on the poet's life up through his first (or Eliotic) poetic identity. These books sketch in the long foreground of the poet before the radical change or remaking (death, resurrection) that comes in Book IV. They carry the poet not lineally but cyclically or spirally, to the point of publication of his poetry previous to writing of The Dream Songs, including Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. The short Book IV ("Op. posth. nos. 1-14"), the only book with a title, dramatizes the death of the old and the birth (or self-resurrection) of the new (or Whitmanian) poetic identity…. The new being that comes "back" to life in Book IV is clearly the poet who will embark on The Dream Songs, written in a style radically different from that of all his previous poetry. The last three books of the work, balancing the first three, focus on this new identity—and the problems of writing a long epic poem in the Whitman tradition. These last books carry the poet through significant stages of his later life to a deeper awareness of some of his most persistent personal problems (or recurring nightmares), to resolution of them or resignation to their endurance.

The "narrative" outlined above is embedded in a cyclic or spiral structure encrusted with a multitude of themes—those that enter the poet's consciousness over the years of the poem's writing (1955–68), carrying the poet from his forty-first year to his fifty-fourth; themes supplemented by memories and imaginative extensions, memories of past years (especially the poet's all-important boyhood) and imaginative re-creations of national or world events. (pp. 246-47)

The most vital event of The Dream Songs is one which occurred long before the time of the loose "narrative frame" of the poem, but which haunts it throughout and provides its most deeply obsessive theme. Berryman was no doubt referring to it when he mentioned in his prefatory Note that Henry had "suffered an irreversible loss": the suicide of his father when the poet was only twelve years old…. [Berryman had a theory that ordeal was necessary for great artistic achievement and his] ordeal for The Dream Songs clearly was his father's suicide. (p. 260)

It is perhaps impossible to ferret out the entire presence of this event in The Dream Songs. But it is easy to guess that it exists behind the guilt, [bitterness, and loss of faith] so brilliantly dramatized in [the work]…. (p. 261)

If we consider the father's suicide the central theme of The Dream Songs, we may imagine the other themes as radiating out from this core and shaped by it. Song 1 ended with an image of continuous, universal death…. There is, of course, all of Book IV envisioning Henry's death and burial—and ultimate resurrection. There are many many other songs that touch on death—friends, acquaintances, often unnamed; and there are many poems that touch on death in a general way, often with a personal twist. (p. 265)

More often than not, death is the inescapable horror in The Dream Songs, and most frequently the poet draws a personal connection—even envisioning his own death, sometimes even seeming to hope for it, sometimes trying to evade it. (p. 266)

In Song 4, the sex-love theme is introduced in The Dream Songs—a theme that seems omnipresent but seldom emotionally dominant. In its context of death, sex seems to get short shrift from Henry, like a passionate spasm followed abruptly by the old familiar agony. (p. 267)

There is a wide range of treatment of the sex-love theme in The Dream Songs…. This theme is, in a way, put in its place in The Dream Songs in Song 311, in which Henry makes an inventory of his desires and needs…. A list of needs, and on the list: women. Before them, hunks of bread and raw onion. Well! But the point is made: the poem above all. When the poet goes to pieces, even the pieces will sit up—and write. The poet's creative vitality is to be conserved, not for love, but for the making of poetry.

The personal dimension is so all-consuming in The Dream Songs that it is sometimes forgotten that the poem was written in a historical context with a great many historical-political references. The period of 1955–68 was a period of great moment in American and world history, and Berryman includes many songs on topics of the day. (pp. 268-69)

[But nowhere] do we feel the passion of political outrage sustained, as, for example, in Ezra Pound or Allen Ginsberg. It seems clear that Berryman felt uneasy in writing these "political" poems. (p. 271)

The sex-lust-love theme and the political (or topical) themes in The Dream Songs by no means go against the grain of the poem; on the contrary, they fill out the "record of a personality" (in the way the various themes in Leaves of Grass, Berryman's acknowledged model, put a personality on record). When Berryman described his model as "Song of Myself," he pointed out that Whitman's poem proposed "a new religion," that it was a "wisdom work, a work on the meaning of life and how to conduct it." Berryman said, "Now I don't go that far … [in The Dream Songs] but I buy a little of it." In short, Berryman believed that, although The Dream Songs did not propose a new religion, they were—in some measure—a wisdom work.

And indeed, the poem conveys a strong sense of "questing" throughout, a search for (to use Berryman's words for Whitman) "the meaning of life and how to conduct it." (pp. 271-72)

Henry's imagination—the source of his poetry, the place of his quest—will be his house until his death. The quest has not revealed the secret, but the quest must go on: in the questing itself is life. In a sense, then, Henry is wrapped in the secret he cannot find. To quest is to live, to know, to be. (p. 274)