[It is] the quality of voice that dominates John Berryman's His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, the … book which extends and completes the 77 Dream Songs of 1964. The annex is a good deal larger than the original building: there are 308 poems here, most of them following the three-stanza, eighteen-line pattern the earlier book established. They rhyme with some regularity; their line lengths vary considerably; sometimes they do and sometimes they do not run on.

But the statistics are only evasions, and will not characterize what the organized sprawl of the book is like or about. Berryman himself has given his own answer to the second question: "The poem then, whatever its wide 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...