Only Sing is a continuation of John Berryman’s vast project The Dream Songs. These 152 never-before-published poems are an expansion of this epic of the American twentieth-century psyche. In the voice and figure of Henry – riddled with desire, self-loathing and a permanent sense of being odds with the world – Berryman created, in the words of McCrae, ‘a hero for a disenchanted nation’. Berryman never saw these dream songs in print but he was content that if they ever appeared, it would ‘be up to the reader to fit those poems in among the published ones’.
