Merrill Moore

For the pianist, see Merrill Moore (musician).
Merrill Moore
Born (1903-09-11)September 11, 1903
Columbia, Tennessee
Died September 20, 1957(1957-09-20) (aged 54)
Occupation M.D., psychiatrist, poet

Merrill Moore (1903 – 1957) was an American psychiatrist and poet from Tennessee.

Early life

Moore was born in 1903 in Columbia, Tennessee.[1] His father, John Trotwood Moore, was a novelist and local historian who served as the State Librarian and Archivist from 1919 to 1929.[2] His paternal grandfather was a lawyer from Marion, Alabama who served in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War.[2]

Moore graduated from Vanderbilt University, where he was a member of the Fugitives, a group of then unknown poets who met to read and criticize each other's poems. He took an M.D. from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in 1928. He interned at the Saint Thomas Hospital in Nashville for a year.[1] 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.

Career

Moore was a psychiatrist in the Ericksonian tradition. He was Robert Frost's psychiatrist briefly.

Throughout his career Moore produced sonnets in a very high volume. Estimates vary but by 1935, Louis Untermeyer had counted 25,000 sonnets in Moore's files, according to a Time Magazine article that year ; 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. ) 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.

It was Moore who put the young Lowell in contact with literary men including Ford Madox Ford, 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. Moore also advised his close friend Frost on the medical treatment of two troubled children. After World War II, Moore played a key behind-the-scenes role in the Ezra Pound 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.

During World War II, Moore was commissioned as a medical officer and served in the Pacific Theater, at one point serving as a personal physician to the Nationalist Chinese supremo, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek (according to the Tennessee State Library and Archives).

Personal life

Moore was married to Ann Leslie, also from Nashville. Together they had four children: Adam, John, Leslie, and Hester.

Death

Moore died in 1957.[1]

Published works

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Dr. Merrill Moore (1903-1957)". The Annette & Irwin Eskind Biomedical Library. Vanderbilt University. Retrieved December 23, 2015.
  2. 1 2 Bailey, Fred Arthur (Spring 1999). "JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE AND THE PATRICIAN CULT OF THE NEW SOUTH". Tennessee Historical Quarterly 58 (1): 16–33. Retrieved December 23, 2015 – via JSTOR. (registration required (help)).

External links

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