THE DREAM SONGS: Complete in Two Volumes: '77 Dream Songs' and 'His Toy, His Dream, His Rest'.

Second printing of '77 Dream Songs'; first edition, first printing of 'His Toy, His Dream, His Rest'. Original pale yellow (Vol. I) and blue cloth (Vol. II) lettered respectively in dark green and gilt, in dustwrapper. A fine, clean set, the bindings square and firm, the contents clean throughout. Complete with the clean and bright dustwrappers, the second volume with a small closed tear (c. 0.5 cm) to the upper spine tip. Both wrappers have been clipped and re-priced by the publisher (£1.30 and £3.25 net). Presentable copies of these volumes – the UK editions in particular, with their wonderful Faber designs – are unusually hard to come by. A lovely set.

"What he has now to say is a long / wonder the world can bear & be." ('Dream Song' no. 1). Berryman's 'Dream Songs' constitute one of the enduring masterpieces of twentieth-century American poetry. Formally intricate, teeming with invention, the 385 (predominantly) eighteen-line poems (77 in the first, 308 in the second volume) comprise, the author notes in the later single-volume edition of the work, "Books I through VII of a poem whose working title, since 1955, has been The Dream Songs". In the same note he addresses the question of how far the work's protean protagonist, Henry, is a self-portrait: "The poem, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry [...], 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. Many opinions and errors in the Songs are to be referred not to the character Henry, still less to the author, but to the title of the work." The caveat noted, it's also clear that Henry was a suitably pliable vehicle for the expression of Berryman's own turbulent energies, his humour and despair, and the Songs include many portraits of, and elegies for, friends and fellow poets. "Poignant, abrasive, anguished, humorous" (Robert Lowell), full of slapstick and sorrow, there's nothing else quite like them. '77 Dream Songs' was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1965; 'His Toy, His Dream, His Rest' was winner of the National Book Award and Bollingen Prize in 1969. (Stefanik A 11.1.g; A 16.1.c)