'Mr. Moore’s Poems Are Obviously Unrevised'

Dr. Merrill Moore (1903-57) is remembered as a psychiatrist and sonneteer with a bad case of poetic elephantiasis. Not that his poems were big. They seldom exceeded fourteen lines but there were a lot of them – one estimate suggests 50,000 -- and a remarkable number actually saw print. He was the sort of poet who could – and often did -- write a sonnet in the car while waiting for the traffic light to change. In 1938 he published M: One Thousand Autobiographical Sonnets (Harcourt, Brace). It tips the scales at almost three pounds. 

Moore was born in Tennessee. At Vanderbilt he was a member of the Fugitives, that group of Southern poets including John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. He went on to teach neurology at Harvard Medical School. Even a layman is tempted to diagnose Dr. Moore’s sonneteering as pathological in origin. One senses he needed to get them out of his system. I’ve probably read several hundred of his sonnets over the years and remember nothing about them, no flash of insight or memorable phrase. I’m fairly certain I’ve never reread a single one. Of course, Moore’s definition of the sonnet is elastic. In his “Admission Note” to Case Record from a Sonnetorium (Twayne, 1951) he writes:

 

“These are samples of the new and varying forms the sonnet can take when it is freed from the ancient prescription that it must have an octet and a sestet to be ‘regular’ (Petrarchan or Italian), and, likewise, that it is ‘irregular’ if it has three quatrains and a couplet (Shakespearean, or English, form). In other words: Give the sonnet a little liberty, and see what happens.”

 

What happens is a whole lot of chopped-up prose with little direction, focus or punch. Why bother calling these things “sonnets”? In 1930, when Yvor Winters reviewed Moore’s The Noise That Time Makes in Poetry, which comes with a foreword by Ransom, he diagnosed the doctor’s problem:

 

“Mr. Ransom, in his introduction to Mr. Moore’s poems, has said that Mr. Moore has always found it easier to write a new poem than to revise an old one; this is, I imagine, true of all of us. Mr. Moore’s poems are obviously unrevised; the meters are a kind of rhymed and butchered prose, and the diction is for the most part very, very approximate, to speak as charitably as possible.”

 

Winters’ assessment might be rubber-stamped on the works of a thousand poets. Revision is the essence of all writing, not just poetry. Few of us get it right the first time. I did find Case Record from a Sonnetorium amusing, though not for his contributions. The book is modeled as a series of medical case histories. Thus, the previously mentioned “Admission Note,” followed by a “Prognosis” by Louis Untermeyer and a series of epigraphs titled “Overheard in the Waiting Room.” The book closes with a “Consultant’s Opinion” by Ransom, a “Laboratory Note” by “Henry H. Wells, Ph.D.” and a “Discharge Note” by William Carlos Williams, M.D. Here’s a sample of a Moore sonnet, “Elizabeth Fox, Single, Age 54”:

 

“Lives alone (alone) on the fifth floor

To which she climbs by power of her legs

After her work at the Five-and-Ten Cent Store

Where she covers counters with green baize

After the sales and customers are over.

 

“Elizabeth has arthritis and her spine

Aches at least eight hours out of nine.

 

“Elizabeth Fox was once young; she is old

Now, her feet and hands are always cold.

 

“The mattress she sleeps on is hard and dirty;

It was clean and soft when she was thirty.

 

“For supper she eats crackers, some preserves,

A piece of bacon and some thin weak tea.

 

“Elizabeth, it is not entirely your own fault.”

 

This is pretty lame stuff, a little embarrassing, though the idea of a physician writing a book of poems based on patients, real or imagined, is promising. The quoted sonnet is typical of Moore’s poems, no worse than most. Now for the good news: the book is wonderfully illustrated by Edward Gorey (1925-2000). Each of the two dozen poems is accompanied by one of his cartoons. The copy I borrowed from the Fondren Library was signed by Moore for Alice Dixon Bond, the literary editor of The Boston Herald from 1940 to 1964: