About Merrill Moore
Merrill Moore, born September 11, 1903, in Columbia, Tennessee, was an American poet and psychiatrist. He was educated at Nashville. His father, John Trotwood Moore, was an author of historical fiction; his mother, Mary Daniel, was State Librarian. Moore attended Vanderbilt University, where he was one of the youngest members of the group known as The Fugitives. He was graduated at twenty-one, went abroad, and, upon his return, determined to separate himself from his father by becoming not only a writer but a doctor and scientist.At twenty-five, he received his M.D. degree, interned in Nashville, moved to Boston, where he joined the Harvard Medical School. He became a neurologist at the Boston City Hospital, and built up a large practice as a specialist in nervous and mental diseases.
Abnormally energetic, Moore was never able to give his work that finish which means perfection; it was easier for him to write a new poem than revise an old one. Breaking through the pattern to the essence, Moore's sonnets range the world for their themes, from the clinic to a contemplation of the farthest nebula, from the fantasies of the unconscious to love poems which mingle passion and raillery.
A psychiatrist, authority on alcoholism, author of some twenty-five medical papers, including the idyllic syphilis and sassafras, Merrill Moore published five volumes and four pamphlets of sonnets. At twenty-four he had written about nine thousand sonnets; at thirty-five he published a volume starkly entitled “M”, accurately indicating that the book contained one thousand pages of sonnets. Moore himself did not know exactly how many sonnets he had composed during a busy life, but a rough estimate accounts for a total of about fifty thousand. If Moore's sonnets intimidate the reader with sheer bulk, they charm with their unpredictability, their superb casualness. In rapid-fire succession they present a genre picture, an abnormal case history, a reasoned meditation, a mad dream, a compact drama, and chaos in fourteen lines.
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Silence can always be broken by the sound?
Of footsteps walking over frozen ground
In winter when the melancholy trees
Stand abject and let their branches freeze.
