John Berryman occupies a central place among the outstanding poets of recent times. Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, which Edmund Wilson called "the most distinguished long poem by an American since "The Waste Land", and The Dream Songs, an astonishing modern epic in which Berryman displayed much of his personality and experience, together earned him the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The autobiographical daring of his poetry, which began as early as 1947 with Berryman's Sonnets, a sequence charting the fortunes of a love affair (not published until 1976), roused the wide interest in the poet's life-story which this biography is designed to meet. -- Book jacket.