This study focuses on theatricality and melancholia in John Berryman's The Dream Songs, and proposes to view them as inherent in the American cultural experience. It discusses Berryman's work in the context of a larger debate on the significance of loss in the process of subject formation and its relation to language, with a commentary on the presences and absences found in the Polish translations of the poem. Revealing the mechanisms of staging the Self after loss, the Songs provide insight into the theatrical and dialogue-driven, context-dependent, intertextual and continuously rewritten character of the American subject.