Yes, there would come a rope.

Men have their hats down, "Dancing in the Dark" will see him up, car-radio-wise

without a rut to park.

which gently and coldly present a lynching in the deep South. And some take Bonesian lyric postures toward experience that is clearly Henry's. The dream songs succeed in conveying all the angst and confusion of a nightmare--the hellish switchings of identy, the loss or mutilation of the physical self--in a form that is scrupulously lyric, based on the canzone, containing (usually) eighteen lines, and variously rhymed.

What do they mean, and why? Berryman is distrustful of most critical postures taken toward contemporary (really contemporary) writing. ("You know," he said, "I can smell a bad book without even opening it. I almost never review them,") And if he has little use for certain critics, resting on descriptive generalizations about his poems and resisting all the slick formulas, the critics have developed very little use for him.

The New Yorker review by Louise Bogan is perhaps the most dangerous, since it comes from someone who should know better. "Berryman is out to get language itself, to distort and maim it, not in the direction of wit but in the direction of funny grammar and burnt-cork comedy." She accuses him of "pulling human speech toward some totally disjunct and invertebrate set of noises." Such a reaction betrays a tin ear and a wooden sense of humor, for the dream songs may be one of the more successful experiments with wit in the language. The poem, taken as the whole it will someday be, acts on the imagination the way any good pun does, writ large. On the crudest level there is something cardinally and delightfully sylleptic about the fact that Henry can be both Henry House and Pussycat, Mr. Bones, the professor and the jazzman. What results is a comedy of tone. Humor depends on the way things are said. "My psychiatrist can lick your psychiatrist (women get under things)"; or from the best Eisenhower poem in years;

This is the lay of lke.

Here's to the glory of the Great White--awk--who has been running--er--er--things in recent--ech--

In the United--if your screen is black,

ladies and gentlemen, we-I like--at the Point he was already terrific--sick--

With the exception of Adrienne Rich and William Meredith, very few riters seem to have both understood and adjusted to the real design behind these poems, which, one imagines, will only be evident when all the remaining books of Dream Songs are published. There are over three hundred songs, in various stages of development; the next collection will contain eighty-four and will be called His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. Until then the very best public interpretation of the man remains 'Miss Rich's" "Berryman earns (his diction) by generating verbal heat, consistently, from within...He is a bruised, raging and fiendishly intelligent man and he has found way of being all three simultaneously."

The immediate observation you are tempted to make is that Henry and Berryman resemble each other strikingly. Both are often teaches: both like jazz, women and Negroes; both are appelled by certain areas of human experience, like Nazi Germany; both are formal and a little old-fashioned; both emphasize beautifully.

All these facts are evident from meeting or hearing the man. The gentle formality that is evident in conversation, transposed to the podium, becomes a real knack for showmanship, a sort of comic modesty that winds up by making him his own master of ceremonies. "No use applauding; you don't know what you're getting," he told an audience at Emerson Hall. "To make sure the evening isn't completely wasted. I'll read a poem by another man first..."He prefaced dream song #29 with a mock-heroic line: "Prepare to weep, ladies and gentlemen. Saul Bellow and I almost kill ourselves laughing about the dream songs and various chapters in his novels, but other people feel bad. Are you all ready to feel bad?" And more sternly," this is not a cultural occasion. No instruction is taking place. It's all entertainment."

Old Henry has an extraordinary capacity for empathy. "This poem," he said of one of the dream songs, "is but in the mouth of a sheep, a sheep of the lost tribe of Israel, who can't hear the shepherd any more.

It's also about Henry. I mean, Henry adopts the guise of a sheep." Such aptitude accounts of the ease with which the dream-song form is adapted to occasions: he has a "strut" for Theodore Roethke, who died in 1963, some poems about Frost, and a fine eulogy for Kennedy, which appeared in Poetry and Power.

Berryman's remarks about his own work, of course, must be taken with a little salt and some cool water. They are devastatingly commonsensical. "There's been an effort, sponsored by Lowell and by other people, to identify me with Henry, which won't work, because I'm obviously not Henry, I mean I have a social security number, and pay taxes, and have an insurance policy and so forth; whereas Henry is a completely undetermined human American male, seeking his identity, and being dissatisfied with it when it is found. I don't buy any of that..."

Proust might have objected that he was real, while Marcel was in the book. What sets Berryman off from Henry is not the simple ontological difference between a character and a person, but the anguish and brilliance of Berryman's effort to make the distinction between the two of them clear and efficient. It is as if the poet, arguing from a feared poverty of emotional or experiential resources, has peopled his poem with a number of lively selves that cooperate in the restoration of personality. A bright, bitter, courtly, intensely human man is writing an autobiographical poem that turns autobiography inside out, and converts it into the sharp images of the hallucination, the cinema and the dream.