The life of John Berryman (1914-1972) is at the center of his poetry. Dealing with obsession, tragedy, desire, ironic comedy, and the deep pain of life itself, Berryman's poetry is both brilliant and tormented. With The Dream Songs, which took him 13 years to complete, Berryman claimed his place as one of the most innovative and important American poets of the twentieth century.

John Berryman was born John Allyn Smith, Jr., in McAlester, Oklahoma, on October 25, 1914, the first child of John Allyn Smith and Martha Little Smith. Berryman's father had left his childhood home in Minnesota to relocate to Oklahoma, where he met and married Little, a schoolteacher. After ten years working as a banker in Oklahoma, Smith moved his family, which by then included a second son, Robert Jefferson (born 1917), to Florida in order to benefit from an economic boom occurring at that time. Unfortunately, by the mid-...