If the contention is accepted that an excess of clarity is the only kind of difficulty a work of art should offer, John Berryman's Dream Songs … have been offering several kinds of unacceptable difficulty since they first began to appear. It was confusedly apparent in the first volume of the work, 77 Dream Songs, that several different personalities within the poet's single personality (one doesn't suggest his "real" personality, or at any rate one didn't suggest it at that stage) had been set talking to and of each other. These personalities, or let them be called characters, were given tones of voice, even separate voices with peculiar idioms. The interplays of voice and attitude were not easy to puzzle out, and many reviewers, according to Mr. Berryman and their own subsequent and sometimes abject admissions, made howlers. With this new volume of 308 more dream songs comes a rather impatient...