The Dream Songs as Epic.

As I said back in 2014, John Berryman is one of my favorite American poets, and I welcome the imminent appearance of Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs; Shane McCrae, who edited it and wrote the introduction, has a Paris Review essay about it from which I offer a few excerpts:It has taken me years to realize that The Dream Songs is an epic—and a successful, even great one. The language of The Dream Songs is always either compressed or suggestive of compression. The poem has this, and little else, in common with traditional epic. But The Dream Songs also, of course, features a hero, as epics traditionally do—Henry. When he does, the reader must take his word for it that he does; he, rather than the narrative of the epic, describes the effects he has.