Merrill Moore was an American poet and psychiatrist.
Background
Austin Merrill Moore was born on September 11, 1903, in Columbia, Tennessee. He was the son of John Trotwood Moore, a novelist and historian, and Mary Brown Daniel, who was also a writer and succeeded her husband after his death as Tennessee state librarian.
Education
In 1907, the family moved to Nashville, where Moore prepared for college at Montgomery Bell Academy. He went on to Vanderbilt University and earned the B. A. in 1924. In 1921, he entered Vanderbilt Medical School. In 1928, he received the M. D. and began a one-year internship at St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville.
Career
While still in high school Moore had begun to write poems, and later, at Vanderbilt, he associated with Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, and other teachers and students seriously interested in poetry. He became the youngest member of the "Fugitives, " a cohesive and influential literary group in Nashville, and helped edit their poetry magazine, The Fugitive. He also contributed his own compositions, sonnets written at first under the pen name "Dendric. " These poems lacked polish, but his lighthearted casualness of manner was a relief from the solemnity of much Fugitive verse. Nineteen numbers of the magazine were published (1922 - 1925) before it was discontinued. Moore's father wanted him to work on a country newspaper, but Moore, while continuing to write poetry, decided on medicine as a career.
In the tradition of Oliver Wendell Holmes, S. Weir Mitchell, and William Carlos Williams, Moore was to couple a medical career, spanning nearly three decades, with a productive literary life. From 1929, when he moved to Boston until 1935 he served at Boston City Hospital, Boston Psychopathic Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital. He began psychoanalytic training with William Herman in 1931 and associated with a group of leading neurologists and psychiatrists that included Tracy Jackson Putnam, Frederic Lyman Wells, Harry C. Solomon, and Stanley Cobb. From 1934 to 1938, he trained under Hanns Sachs, an early associate of Freud. In the 1930's, and 1940's Moore taught neurology, neuropathology, and psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and was a clinical associate in psychiatry there after 1950.
In the period 1938-1940, Moore assisted Jewish physicians fleeing Nazi Germany. In World War II, he was a major in the U. S. Army, serving as a psychiatrist in New Zealand and the South Pacific. After returning to civilian life, he resumed private practice in Boston and some of his previous teaching duties. Moore continued to turn out sonnets, often four or five each day. Moore died in Quincy, Massachusetts.
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Politics
Moore had never been very active in politics, but he was what is generally called a Democrat.
Views
From his first book, The Noise That Time Makes (1929), Moore held to the views of his art expressed in the foreword to Illegitimate Sonnets (1950): "I like to experiment (or tamper if you prefer) with the sonnet form: I treat it roughly or kindly, as I please. The sonnet has taken root in my subconscious mind so deeply that now when I am working on one I know when I have reached the end without consciously stopping to count the lines. Like a dog playing with a bone, sometimes I gnaw the form, sometimes I merely sharpen my teeth on it, but I hope never to bury it. "
Quotations:
"I am most interested in human personality and its problems, and it is on that common interest in my own life that medicine and poetry meet. "
"Here in Boston I practice private medicine from one to six every afternoon, teach psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and work in the free clinics in the morning. That leaves only evenings off for writing. "
Personality
Enormously energetic and industrious, Moore was considered brilliant but erratic and absentminded by his friends and colleagues.
His energy and creativity amazed his medical colleagues, fellow poets, and literary critics; some of whom, like Yvor Winters, thought he wrote too much and too carelessly.
Moore used only one form, the sonnet, but he used it freely. There are numerous meters and rhyme schemes in his poems, most of which have fourteen lines. He had a sharp gift of characterization. Some of his sonnets are poignant and penetrating, and others warm, witty, and whimsical.
He was a spirited talker, an accomplished amateur conchologist, a photographer, and a strong long-distance swimmer who for several years competed in the marathon swim to the Boston Light.
Quotes from others about the person
"Mr. Moore's poems are obviously unrevised, " Winters wrote.
Robert Frost said of Moore: “Serious physician and serious artist, he had no notion of being taken lightly; still there was something of the rogue there that was a part of his great charm. He seldom cracked a smile. ”
Connections
On August 14, 1930, Moore married Ann Leslie Nichol of Nashville, Tennessee. They had four children.