published some of this early verse in his first book, Poems, in 1942. His first mature collection of poems, The Dispossessed, appeared six years later, published by William Sloane Associates. The book received largely negative reviews from poets like Jarrell, who wrote, in The Nation, that Berryman was "a complicated, nervous, and intelligent [poet]" whose work was too derivative of W. B. Yeats. Berryman later concurred with this assessment of his early work, saying, "I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats." In October 1942, Berryman married Eileen Mulligan (later Simpson) in a ceremony at St. Patrick's Cathedral, with Van Doren as his best man. The couple moved to Beacon Hill, and Berryman lectured at Harvard. The marriage ended in 1953 (the divorce was formalized in 1956), when Simpson finally grew weary of Berryman's affairs and acting as "net-holder" during his self-destructive personal crises. Simpson memorialized her time with Berryman and his circle in her 1982 book Poets in Their Youth. In 1947, Berryman started an affair with a married woman named Chris Haynes, documented in a long sonnet sequence that he refrained from publishing in part because that would have revealed the affair to his wife. He eventually published the work, Berryman's Sonnets, in 1967. It includes over one hundred sonnets. In 1950, Berryman published a biography of the fiction writer and poet Stephen Crane, whom he greatly admired. The book was followed by his next significant poem, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956), which featured illustrations by the artist Ben Shahn and was Berryman's first poem to receive "national attention" and a positive response from critics. Edmund Wilson wrote that it was "the most distinguished long poem by an American since T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land." When Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and Other Poems was published in 1959, the poet Conrad Aiken praised the book's shorter poems, which he found superior to "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet". Despite his third book of verse's relative success, Berryman's great poetic breakthrough occurred with 77 Dream Songs (1964). It won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and solidified Berryman's standing as one of the most important poets of the post-World War II generation that included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Delmore Schwartz. Soon thereafter, the press began to give Berryman a great deal of attention, as did arts organizations and even the White House, which sent him an