John Berryman

John Allyn Smith was born in McAlester, Oklahoma, in 1914, lost his father in 1926 and took the name of his stepfather, John Angus McAlpin Berryman. A Columbia graduate, he spent two years at Cambridge, where he talked with Auden, and met Yeats in London. He taught for more than thirty years at American universities, at the University of Minnesota from 1955. He produced a life of Stephen Crane, a poem about Anne Bradstreet, a sequence of sonnets and the sequence begun in 1955. He died in Minneapolis in January 1972, at the age of fifty-seven.

In the catalogue 1

• PoetryThe Dream SongsJohn Berryman · 1969Literature