Kallman was born in
Brooklyn of
Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. He received his B.A. at
Brooklyn College and his M.A. at the
University of Michigan. He published three collections of poems,
Storm at Castelfranco (1956),
Absent and Present (1963), and
The Sense of Occasion (1971). He lived most of his adult life in New York, spending his summers in Italy from 1948 through 1957 and in
Austria from 1958 through 1974. In 1963 he moved his winter home from
New York to
Athens, Greece. He died there of a heart attack on January 18, 1975, eleven days after his 54th birthday. His funeral, in the third Jewish cemetery of
Athens, was attended by some of his closest friends and colleagues, such as
James Merrill, David Jackson, Tony Parigory, Nelly Liambey, Bernie Winebaum,
Rachel Hadas and
Alan Ansen. Kallman was the sole beneficiary of Auden's estate but died
intestate himself, with the result that the Auden estate was inherited by Kallman's next-of-kin, his father, Edward (1892–1986), a New York dentist then in his eighties. ==Career==