John Berryman's "Programmatic" for The Dream Songs and an Instance of Revision

Among John Berryman’s papers at the University of Minnesota Libraries Manuscripts Division is a series of rough, sporadic notes kept by the poet as he was working on his major project, The Dream Songs.¹ At times headed with the word “programmatic,” these notes are both conceptual and analytic, laying out the plan and organization of the long sequence of poems and critiquing the progress and quality of the individual Dream Songs as they were written. Throughout his career, Berryman used notes to plan future projects in both poetry and prose, many of which never reached completion. However, with each of his major poems, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1953) and The Dream Songs, Berryman’s extensive notes, while not systematic in form or clearly collated by the author, offer invaluable insight into his method, concerns, and intent.

Berryman began writing Dream Songs in 1955, and the notes for them seem to have begun around the same time. While most of the roughly twenty-five pages of notes are undated, one of the most crucial documents, a page headed “form,” bears the date “1955? ‘56?” in the upper right corner. The question marks, which also appear on various dated manuscript pages of poems, indicate that Berryman occasionally reviewed his work and attempted to date it. This is the case throughout the archive, even with some of the many scraps of paper containing a single or a few lines of poetry, random thoughts which occurred to the writer as he worked, or very broad ideas for projected works. Some of these fragments are specifically dated by day, month, and year, others undated, while still others bear tentative dates of a year followed by a question mark, as with the “form” page. Apparently never organized by their author, the Dream Song notes fall randomly amidst the draft and manuscript pages of both the published and unpublished Songs. While some of the notes reflect back over the poems which had been organized for the first volume, indicating that they date to the early-to-mid 1960s, many belong to the 1955-1960 period, when Berryman conceived and began writing the sequence. As he found his form and voice and became more comfortable with his new technique, the notes decrease in frequency. But, conversely, as the manuscript of 77 Dream Songs takes shape during the early 1960s, the notes increasingly take on a therapeutic function, a means for the poet to reassure himself that his book-in-the-making has a discernible form, as well as an overall unity, both thematically and technically.

The page headed “form” and dated 1955-56 is almost certainly the earliest page of notes.² The first Dream Song which Berryman wrote, one ultimately excluded from the collection, was drafted on 12 August 1955, and the plan for a volume of the Songs conceived nine days later.³ In these notes on the form of his new undertaking, Berryman envisions a group of twenty five to thirty poems, comprising “a whole book, or the major part of one.” He instructs himself to “ad lib,” but to make “each a poem, w. a title, subj., theme.” Of course these plans changed as the work progressed, for the Dream Songs when published contained few titled poems, and both the poet, and eventually the book’s reviewers, would question how well some of the individual Songs stood alone as poems. Even on this earliest sheet of notes, Berryman anticipates what will become his ongoing concern with unity, as well as the possible need to interrelate the individual poems, by noting that the poems should be “inevitably semi-contrapuntal.” He wanted to have the “stronger work to [toward] either coarse or soft,” with “less obvious-lyricism.” Looking to his earlier work for a possible model, he turned to the nine “Nervous Songs” of The Dispossessed (1948), in which he had used an array of voices within a regular form, three six-line stanzas. But according to the 1955-56 notes, the new poems were to employ “a much ‘rougher’ & more ‘brilliant’” technique than...