His real name was, of all things, John Smith, and he was born in 1914 in McAlester, Oklahoma, the elder son and namesake of a man who, after failing miserably both as a small-town banker in that state and as the proprietor of a modest Tampa, Florida, eatery, shuffled off this mortal coil in 1926 by means of a self-inflicted bullet wound. His death was followed hard upon—within ten weeks, in fact—by his canny widow’s marriage to the family’s landlord, a prosperous bond salesman named John Angus McAlpin Berryman; and it was not long afterward that the new Mrs. Berryman divested both her children, eleven-year-old John and six-year-old Robert Jefferson, of their father’s last name and Catholic religion, changed her own name from Martha May to Jill Angel, and relocated the newly formed Berryman clan to New York. Three years later, the stock market crash devastated John Angus and forced Jill Angel to go to work; but her adored elder son, now named John Allyn McAlpin Berryman, continued to receive a first-rate education: after being graduated from the South Kent School, an Episcopal boarding academy in Connecticut, he proceeded to make a mark for himself as an up-and-coming poet and literary man at Columbia College (where he studied under Mark Van Doren) and at Cambridge University (which he attended on a Kellett Fellowship).

Why a poet? The young man’s intense, possessive mother—to whom he was tied by extraordinary bonds of mutual guilt, resentment, and love, and whose influence