Considering Merrill Moore, M.D.

Merrill Moore was a large, imposing man, or at least that is how I remember him (his build was that of a long-distance swimmer, which he was). I met him only once, when I was a senior at Phillips Academy. Dudley Fitts, one of my teachers, invited him to come up and read his poems. These poems were—and are—instantly accessible without any analysis, and I was sufficiently taken with them to go to the academy’s Oliver Wendell Holmes Library and try to check out Clinical Sonnets. Try? No, no—Elizabeth Eades, the school librarian, didn’t approve of these excessively candid, even suggestive poems and, scowling, said that she would not allow me to borrow the book unless I had a note from a faculty member. The poem to which I believe Ms. Eades most strenuously objected was “Conversation with Gertrude or as simple as that. She was a waitress in a nightclub in a loquacious mood who took it into her head to tell me how she picked her man. He’s got to be a good spender or I won’t go out with him. Tell me how you can tell if he’s a good spender? Oh, I take care to see that he has a fat roll.” And, yes, that entire thing is the title. I went to request such a note from Fitts, who laughed and wrote one.

I can’t think of another instance of my having to get permission to read a book of poems. But the need to do so on that occasion lent a degree of glamor to Moore’s work, which many censored and banned books have, books on the index librorum prohibitorum. Banned in Boston used to be a tag publishers would put in ads because they knew it would promote sales elsewhere. (Though Bostonians, I had always assumed, could cross the river into Cambridge and buy the book there.)

I cheerfully confess that because of this experience with the redoubtable Ms. Eades I have had a special fondness for Moore’s poetry that has lasted more than sixty-odd years. My admiration for him has by now been somewhat qualified, but he has not, like Carl Sandburg or e. e. cummings, become an embarrassment. I still find many things to like in M (a thousand sonnets by Merrill Moore) and the smaller collections.

At the other end of the spectrum there were unquestioned masters back in those days whose reputations have receded almost into oblivion, so that Moore is by no means the only poet, the mention of whose name is likely to elicit an owl-like “Who?” Who reads Conrad Aiken these days, or Winfield Townley Scott? Delmore Schwartz persists, but that is mostly because he was the butt of an extended joke in Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, which is a fairly lofty perch. (Even so, who actually reads Schwartz anymore?) Moore also had connections that save him from complete obscurity: he was the youngest of the Fugitives at Vanderbilt (together with Robert Penn Warren and others), and he was Robert Lowell’s psychiatrist. That Lowell remained erratic, bipolar, and difficult to manage was not Moore’s fault. Lithium and the rest of the psychopharmacopeia might have helped move Cal (short for Caligula, his prep-school nickname) from loony to merely unpleasant. On the other hand it is hardly to Moore’s credit that, as Ian Hamilton reports, he told the poet that he was “an unwanted child,” or that Robert suspected Moore was having an affair with his mother, Charlotte. Dr. Moore also took care of Robert Frost’s children—his son, Carroll, who shot himself, and his daughter, Irma, who was depressed enough to be committed to a mental hospital. But was there any other psychiatrist, back in those days without drugs, who could have done any better?

Finally there is the mythology, faded mostly but odd enough for a few people to remember it. Moore is said to have written many, many sonnets. The estimates range from 15,000 to 50,000, but after...