TWA Poet: John Berryman

1914 - 1972

It's the birthday of poet and professor John Berryman, born in McAlester, Oklahoma (1914). He wrote a hundred sonnets based on an affair he had with one of his graduate students, and then he became famous for a book-length poem he wrote to a Puritan woman who'd been dead nearly three centuries.

That work, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, took him five year…