Merrill Moore - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Biography

Moore attended Nashville's Vanderbilt University

Vanderbilt University

Vanderbilt University is a private research university located in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1873, the university is named for shipping and rail magnate "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided Vanderbilt its initial $1 million endowment despite having never been to the...

, where he was a member of the Fugitives

Fugitives

The Fugitives were a group of poets and literary scholars who came together at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, United States, around 1920. They published a small literary magazine called The Fugitive from 1922-1925 which showcased their works...

, a group of then unknown poets who met to read and criticize each other's poems. Moore, the youngest Fugitive, was a prolific contributor to the group's meetings and, starting in 1922, to its eponymous journal, in which his earliest contributions were published under the pseudonym "Dendric" alongside work of John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom was an American poet, essayist, magazine editor, and professor.-Life:...

, Donald Davidson (poet)

Donald Davidson (poet)

Donald Grady Davidson was a U.S. poet, essayist, social and literary critic, and author...

, Allen Tate

Allen Tate

John Orley Allen Tate was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1943 to 1944.-Life:...

and Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...

and others.

Moore took an M.D. at Vanderbilt in 1928. After the death of his father in 1929, Moore removed to Boston and except for military service during World War II, spent the rest of his career there.

Besides his medical and literary pursuits, he was close to the families of Robert Frost

Robert Frost

Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and...

and Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell

Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...

and an adept literary networker. It was Moore who put the young Lowell in contact with literary men including Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature...

, Tate and Ransom, and who encouraged Lowell to become a student of Ransom after Lowell's sudden violent break with his family and departure from Harvard.http://harvardmagazine.com/2004/05/the-brahmin-rebel.html http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/uthrc/00081/hrc-00081.html Moore also advised his close friend Frost on the medical treatment of two troubled children.http://www.jstor.org/pss/3849651 After World War II, Moore played a key behind-the-scenes role in the Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

controversy, as a member of a group of literary men who saw to it that the modernist icon escaped a treason trial for his radio propaganda in support of Mussolini. Moore was a close friend of one of the psychiatrists on a diagnostic panel that found Pound unfit to stand trial. http://books.google.com/books?id=nV2a3E-S6LAC&pg=PA93&lpg=PA93&dq=%22ezra+pound%22+%22merrill+moore%22+overholser&source=bl&ots=yNB4q-e-i-&sig=aVx1a7xI8hvDphE4d2OwQV8gqq8&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result

Throughout his career Moore produced sonnet

Sonnet

A sonnet is one of several forms of poetry that originate in Europe, mainly Provence and Italy. A sonnet commonly has 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound"...

s in a very high volume. Estimates vary but by 1935, Louis Untermeyer

Louis Untermeyer

Louis Untermeyer was an American poet, anthologist, critic, and editor. He was appointed the fourteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1961.-Life and career:...

had counted 25,000 sonnets in Moore's files, according to a Time Magazine article that year http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,748448,00.html?iid=digg_share; just over two years later, a 1938 Talk of the Town piece in the New Yorker put Moore's total production of sonnets at 50,000. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1938/12/24/1938_12_24_009_TNY_CARDS_000176802) Moore discovered his affinity for the sonnet form while still in secondary school and is said to have learned shorthand during college in order to be able to write more sonnets between classes. Although some of his work, such as the posthumous quatrain collection The Phoenix and the Bees, is in other forms, the poet-psychiatrist wrote and archived his poems in a dedicated home office he called his "sonnetorium."

Some of his books were illustrated by Edward Gorey

Edward Gorey

Edward St. John Gorey was an American writer and artist noted for his macabre illustrated books.-Early life:...

.

Until his death from cancer, Moore was married to Ann Leslie Moore, also from Nashville.

Although he is known mostly as a poet, Merrill Moore was highly regarded as a keen and effective psychiatrist, and a practitioner of a progressive directed psychiatric intervention, similar to the style pioneered by Milton Erickson. Willing to be vividly unconventional, he tended a small garden, behind his Commonwealth Avenue office, barefoot, because he "liked the feel of grass in his toes".

During World War II, Moore was commissioned as a medical officer and served in the Pacific theatre, at one point serving as a personal physician to the Nationalist Chinese supremo, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek

Chiang Kai-shek

Chiang Kai-shek was a political and military leader of 20th century China. He is known as Jiǎng Jièshí or Jiǎng Zhōngzhèng in Mandarin....

(according to the Tennessee State Library and Archives).

Moore's father, John Trotwood Moore (1858–1929), a regionally prominent novelist and magazine editor, served as Tennessee State Librarian and had been appointed Poet Laureate of Tennessee.http://puka.cs.waikato.ac.nz/cgi-bin/cic/library?a=d&d=p886 Mr. Moore was succeded by his wife, Mary Brown Daniel Moore (1875-1957)(sic), who remained in that positionfor some twenty years.

Published works

The Noise that Time Makes. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929.
Six Sides to a Man. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935.
M - One thousand autobiographical sonnets. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938
Clinical Sonnets. New York: Twayne Publishers. 1949.
Illegitimate Sonnets. New York: Twayne Publishers. 1950. Inside covers include illustrations by Edward Gorey
Edward Gorey
Edward St. John Gorey was an American writer and artist noted for his macabre illustrated books.-Early life:...

.
Case-Record from a Sonnetorium. New York: Twayne Publishers. 1951. Illustrated by Edward Gorey
Edward Gorey
Edward St. John Gorey was an American writer and artist noted for his macabre illustrated books.-Early life:...

, additional text by John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom
John Crowe Ransom was an American poet, essayist, magazine editor, and professor.-Life:...

, William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

and others.
Clinical Sonnets. Illustrated ed. New York: Twayne Publishers. 1953. Illustrated by Edward Gorey
Edward Gorey
Edward St. John Gorey was an American writer and artist noted for his macabre illustrated books.-Early life:...

.
More Clinical Sonnets. New York: Twayne Publishers. 1953. Illustrated by Edward Gorey
Edward Gorey
Edward St. John Gorey was an American writer and artist noted for his macabre illustrated books.-Early life:...
The Verse Diary of a Psychiatrist. 1954.
A Doctor's Book of Hours. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas. 1955.
The Hill of Venus. New York: Twayne Publishers. 1957.
The Phoenix and the Bees. Baltimore: Contemporary Poetry. 1959.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.