[2] The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry calls The Dream Songs "[Berryman's] major work" and notes that "[the poems] form, like his friend Robert Lowell's Notebook, a poetic journal, and represent, half phantasmagorically, the changes in Berryman's mood and attitude.

But according to The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry: When the first volume, 77 Dream Songs, was misinterpreted as simple autobiography, Berryman wrote in a prefatory note to the sequel, "The poem then, whatever its cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof.

"[5] Controversially, this unnamed friend speaks in a Southern, black dialect and in "blackface," as Berryman indicates, suggesting a kind of literary minstrelsy.

Nonetheless, the poems are, in part, about an American light that is not as pure as we may wish; or whose purity may rely not just on success (the dream) but on failure (the song).

.The voice shifts from high to low, from archaic language to slang, slant rhyme to full, attempting to render something of jazz or, more accurately, the blues—devil's music.

That the poem can let in all sorts of Americanisms—not just Greek, as Eliot would have it—and not as signs of culture's decay, but of its American vitality, is fearless and liberating.

The Academy of American Poets states that "the poems of 77 Dream Songs are characterized by their unusual syntax, mix of high and low diction, and virtuosic language.

Commonly anthologized dream songs [from this volume] include 'Filling her compact & delicious body,' 'Henry sats,' 'I’m scared a lonely,' and 'Henry’s Confession.'"

One particularly glowing review came from John Malcolm Brinnin of The New York Times, who wrote: Strictly in terms of technique, the book is a knockout.

Before its publication, the poets Adrienne Rich and Robert Lowell praised the book, particularly the opening "Opus Posthumous" section in which Henry speaks to the reader from the grave.

[11] The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry says that, in this volume, "[Berryman] described personal calamities and the deaths of friends such as the poets Frost, Winters, MacNeice, Jarrell, Roethke, Plath, Williams, and especially Schwartz.