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The Dream Songs is a compilation of two books of poetry, ''77 Dream Songs'' (1964) and ''His Toy, His Dream, His Rest'' (1968) by the American poet John Berryman. According to Berryman's "Note" to ''The Dream Songs'', "This volume combines ''77 Dream Songs'' and ''His Toy, His Dream, His Rest'', comprising Books I through VII of a poem whose working title, since 1955, has been ''The Dream Songs''."〔Berryman, John. ''The Dream Songs''. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. 1969.〕 So as this note indicates, Berryman clearly intended the two books to be read as a single work. In total, the work consists of 385 individual poems. The book is listed on the American Academy of Poets website as one of their ''Groundbreaking Books'' of the 20th Century.〔http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5969〕 ''The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry'' editors call ''The Dream Songs'', "(Berryman's ) major work" and they go on to note that "(poems ) form, like his friend Robert Lowell's ''Notebook'', a poetic journal, and represent half phantasmagorically, the changes in Berryman's mood and attitude."〔Ellman, Richard and Robert O'Clair. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1973.〕 The dream song form consists of three stanzas, divided into six lines per stanza. The poems are in free verse with irregular rhyme schemes. The songs are all numbered but only some of them have individual titles. ==Main Characters== The work follows the travails of a character named "Henry" who bears a striking resemblance to Berryman. However, ''The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry'' editors note the following clarification on this matter of autobiography in the work: When the first volume, ''77 Dream Songs'', was misinterpreted as simple autobiography, Berryman wrote in a prefatory note to the sequel, "The poem then, whatever its cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof."〔 In other statements on the matter of Henry's identity, Berryman is less strict about the differentiation between himself and Henry, stating in an interview, "Henry does resemble me, and I resemble Henry; but on the other hand I am not Henry. You know, I pay income tax; Henry pays no income tax. And bats come over and they stall in my hair—and fuck them, I'm not Henry; Henry doesn't have any bats." 〔"An Interview with John Berryman" conducted by John Plotz of the Harvard Advocate on Oct. 27, 1968. In Berryman's Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman. Ed. Harry Thomas. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/berryman/interviews.htm〕 Also, in a reading that Berryman gave at the Guggenheim Museum with Robert Lowell in 1963, he discusses the character of Henry by saying, "Henry has a hard time. People don't like him, and he doesn't like himself. In fact, he doesn't even know what his name is. His name at one point seems to be Henry House, and at another point it seems to be Henry Pussycat. . .He () has a 'friend' who calls him Mr. Bones, and I use friend in quotation marks because this is one of the most hostile friends who ever lived."〔Lowell, Robert and John Berryman. Guggenheim Poetry Reading. New York: Academy of American Poets Archive, 1963. 88 minutes.〕 Controversially, the unnamed "friend," to whom Berryman refers, speaks in a Southern, black dialect and in "blackface," as Berryman indicates, suggesting a kind of literary minstrelsy. Kevin Young, an African-American poet who edited a ''Selected Poems'' of Berryman for Library of America, commented on this issue: () use of "black dialect" is frustrating and even offensive at times, as many have noted, and deserves examination at length. Nonetheless, the poems are, in part, about an American light that is not as pure as we may wish; or whose purity may rely not just on success (the dream) but on failure (the song). . .In turn, the poems are not a song of "myself" but a song of multiple selves. Instead of a cult of personality, we have a clash of personalities—the poems' protagonist Henry speaks not just as "I" but as "he," "we," and "you". . .Berryman relied on the shifting form to explain in part his disparate personalities. . .The voice shifts from high to low, from archaic language to slang, slant rhyme to full, attempting to render something of jazz or, more accurately, the blues—devil's music. What emerges and succeeds is something of a sonnet plus some—a devil's sonnet, say (the three sixes stanzas too obvious to be ignored). Berryman's heresy is against the polite modernism that preceded him. That the poem can let in all sorts of Americanisms—not just Greek, as Eliot would have it—and not as signs of culture's decay, but of its American vitality, is fearless and liberating.〔Young, Kevin. "On Form." http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/on_poetry/poets_on_form_kevin_young/〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Dream Songs」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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