XXX ─ 100 Poems

Merrill Moore was a key member of the Fugitive group of poets, a group of then unknown poets who met to read and criticize each other’s work and that included John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. David R. Slavitt, poet and novelist, has distilled and presented the very best of Moore’s work from amongst the many published and unpublished poems available. This ?re-introduction’ will help establish Merrill Moore as an overlooked master of form and fluency in the modern American poem.

Merrill Moore was born on September 11 1903, in Columbia, Tennessee, to John Trotwood Moore and Mary Brown Daniel Moore. His father was also a Tennessee poet, novelist, and magazine editor. Moore attended Montgomery Bell Academy and Vanderbilt University, where he earned his Bachelor’s degree in 1924 and a Medical Doctorate in 1928. He was a member of the Fugitives, a group of then unknown poets who met to read and criticize each other’s work and that included John Crowe ￠ansom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate and ￠obert Penn Warren and others. Moore said of his fellow Fugitives, ?We all influenced each other; we all rubbed the edges oV each other and knocked sparks out of each other in a peculiar way.’ In 1929, shortly after his father’s death, Moore accepted a position at Boston City Hospital. Later, while in private practice, he taught at the prestigious Harvard Medical School. There and in his private practice, he was particularly interested in alcoholism and suicide, about which he published many articles. Moore married Anne Nichols in 1930 and the couple had four children: Adam, John, Leslie, and Hester. He served in a medical capacity in the U.S. Army during World War II both in New Zealand and the South PaciWc and earned a Bronze Star and an Army Commendation medal. At one point he served as a personal physician to the Nationalist Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek. He died of cancer on 20 September 1957, in Quincy, Massachusetts. David R. Slavitt is the author of more than 116 books ? novels, poetry, reportage, and translations. He was the movie reviewer for Newsweek in the sixties and was co-editor of the Johns Hopkins Complete Roman Drama as well as the Penn Complete Greek Drama.