Merrill Moore Biography

American poet, born in Columbia, Tennessee; he studied medicine at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. Whilst a student, Moore submitted some of his poems to the magazine The Fugitive, and his poetic career was soon associated with the Agrarians who published the journal. A massively prolific writer of sonnets, he reinvented and adapted that form for the American idiom. He then became a practising psychiatrist in Boston, but continued to publish poetry using the sonnet form with great fluency and flexibility. His collections include The Noise that Time Makes (1929), It Is a Good Deal Later than You Think (1934), Six Sides to a Man (1935), M: One Thousand Autobiographical Sonnets (1938), Some Poems for New Zealand (1945), Clinical Sonnets (1949), Illegitimate Sonnets (1950), and More Clinical Sonnets (1953).