J. V. Cunningham was born in Cumberland, Maryland, and grew up in Montana. Writing of himself in the third person, he says, "The tradition that surrounded him and formed the texture of his early years was the tradition of Irish Catholics along the railroads of the West." At Stanford University, he studied the Renaissance with W. D. Briggs and poetry with Yvor Winters. While still an undergraduate he published poems in Commonweal, the Bookman, Poetry, Hound and Horn, and the New Republic . He graduated from Stanford in 1934, and after a period of "wandering in the depression," he returned to Stanford in 1937 for graduate work and took the Ph.D. in 1945. Cunningham has been married three times: to the poet Barbara Gibbs (1937-1942), to Dolora Gallagher (1945-1949), and to his present wife, Jessie MacGregor Cambell, since 1950. He has one daughter. He has taught at the University of Hawaii, the...