The poet John Berryman hit upon a new method in the 1960s. His mask or alter ego, Henry, is ‘a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered irreversible loss’. Crucially, at least according to Berryman’s introduction to The Dream Songs (1969), Henry is ‘not the poet, not me’. They did share a lot of similar experiences, however, and were practically inseparable for the rest of Berryman’s tragically foreshortened life. In some ways, Henry was an evolution of Berryman’s voice in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, a breakthrough poem published in 1956, in which he addressed the ghost of the early American poet Anne Bradstreet using a blend of ancient and modern idioms. The method freed him up from a former, drily Audenesque, style – a cloistered, mannered diction which was at times so stiltedly well-behaved that his friend Dylan Thomas offered to lend him a few singing lines, to jazz things up a little. 

Henry was anything but well-behaved, and The Dream Songs became, in the words of Shane McCrae, the editor of this new volume, ‘an epic – and a successful, even great one’, with Henry a ‘hero for a disenchanted nation’. Berryman was caught up in a rivalrous friendship with fellow ‘confessional’ Robert Lowell, who since Life Studies (1959) had turned the material of his own life into symbol-laden, densely autobiographical poetry. Both, in the words of Lowell’s biographer Ian Hamilton, were undertaking ‘an impassioned exploration of whatever chances the imagination still has of making sense of a civilisation that is bent on self-destruction’, and both were struggling with their own psychological damage. For their generation, poetry seemed as much a death struggle as an art form, with contemporaries Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton adding to a pervading sense of high-stakes extremity.  In Only Sing, McCrae has collected 152 ‘new’ Dream Songs, until now unpublished but of a piece with, and fitting into, Berryman’s extant ‘epic’. He points out that Berryman had spoken about these additional Songs, fully expecting their later publication and intending the future reader to fit them in