Vassar Miller: A Retrospective: Introduction

When Vassar Miller died in October, 1998, at seventy-four, the world lost a fine poet, and this journal, a longtime contributing editor. Vassar, who was Poet Laureate of Texas, wrote about the big subjects: God, love, suffering, and death. She chose conventional, even rigid, forms, then burst through them with passion. Inevitably, readers who knew her personal history spoke also about the literally rigid form of her own body. Vassar had severe cerebral palsy. She wrote, she said, "thumbing the thesaurus of [her] bones." But she wanted to be known as a poet, not as someone with cerebral palsy who wrote poetry. How she hated that epithet! Yet, when I invited her to read before a clinical audience, she accepted, knowing that one of my motives was to let my colleagues and students see the sparkling mind that dominated her body so that they might treat disabled patients with gentle accuracy. Such mixed motives are common in our field. Are they wrong? Large segments of literary and ethical theory would have to be brought in to answer that question properly. Here we want only to mourn and honor Vassar Miller, and perhaps to realize in response to the story of her horrifying last years that our work in the medical humanities is far from finished. We have asked Vassar's good friend Bruce Kellner, himself a writer, to set down his memories of her.

--Joanne Trautmann Banks

Joanne Trautmann Banks, Professor of Humanities and English at Pennsylvannia State University's College of Medicine 1972-1986, is a founding editor of this journal. Outside of the medical humanities, her major work has been the editing of Virginia Woolf's letters in seven volumes.

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