The Dream Songs is a compilation of two separate books of poetry, 77 Dream Songs" (1964), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest* (1968), which won a National Book Award. Berryman claimed that the contents of the two books had always been conceived as one long poem, or poem cycle, and meant to be read as a single work.
The central character of the poems is Henry, who is understood to be a veiled autobiographical version of Barryman. Barryman himself admitted similarities between the two, but always insisted that they were different, and that the character Henry was not a stand-in for himself.