Going “wicked & away”: Writing Dream Songs in the Age of Fellowships

John Berryman’s poetry volume 77 Dream Songs (1964) depicts its own composition as a vocational act of protest against the circumstances that force poets to teach in universities to earn a living. In Berryman’s poems, this vocational crisis inspires a crisis of form; repetition, previously a central constituent of poetry, now evokes the specter of boring work-time. To realize one’s creative potential, Berryman insists throughout his Songs that a poet needs “whole time,” free from the nine-to-five grind. In this era of expanding higher education, whole time comes in the form of fellowships, as private foundations offer the time and money to save poets from the classroom. Indeed, Berryman’s second volume of Dream Songs regard their composition as a creative process enabled by a Guggenheim fellowship. However, this poetry also provides an ironic image of contemporary academic labor, where the dream of work as self-fulfillment parallels the nightmare of self-exploitation.