"A perceptive, insightful biography of perhaps the most important American poet of the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens, by an accomplished biographer and poet who traces Stevens's lifelong artistic quest"--

"Few poets have lived as extraordinary and fascinating a life as Hart Crane, the American poet who made his meteoric rise in the late 1920s and then as suddenly flamed out, killing himself at the age of thirty-two and thus turning his life and poetry into the stuff of myth. A midwesterner who came to New York to remake not only the face of the city but also American poetry, this young visionary in the tradition of Whitman and Rimbaud insisted on walking...

In this balanced biography of the complex and troubled man, Mariani interweaves Berryman's personal life with his evolving ideas about poets and poetry, and places him amongst his artistic and critical contemporaries. Concerned with Berryman the poet and critic, the author traces Berryman's literary career from his Columbia days where he was befriended by Blakmur and Van Doren, to his Cambridge study and meetings with T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and...