Loose Canons Four:
Merrill Moore: Blue & Yellow Evening at Ostend

The fourth in an ongoing series of pamphlets celebrating and reintroducing poets and poems unfairly neglected or forgotten

October 2025

Merrill Moore (1903–1957) is recognized, when he is remembered at all, as ‘the man who wrote all those sonnets.’ But that is an insubstantial and jejune description of a poet of profound human insight and deft, crisp lyricism.

Moore was born in Tennessee in 1903 to an old southern family which was, in many ways, trying to move on from the destruction and despair visited on the south by the civil war, which had ended less than forty years earlier. His father, John Trotwood Moore, was a recognized poet, essayist, and novelist, some of whose attitudes would strike many today as dreadful (and were) but who nevertheless instilled in his son not only a knowledge of the classics, but a sense of the importance of heritage and the compelling momentum of tradition.

Merrill Moore received all his schooling from childhood to university graduation in Tennessee, and the instincts of his generation led him a considerable distance from the received attitudes of his family: the social, intellectual, and literary paths Moore followed diverged considerably from the traditional South of his upbringing. At eighteen he became one of the youngest members of the ‘Fugitive’ group of poets and writers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville – so-called because of The Fugitive, a journal they founded and published from 1922 to 1925. These writers were concerned with retaining formal structures in poetry, and founded their work in the southern experience of their own generation. Several of them, particularly Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, became (and remain) important figures of American poetry between the wars. Having taken an M.D. from Vanderbilt Medical School, Moore later moved to Boston and took an additional degree as a psychiatrist, lecturing on neurology at Harvard Medical School for some years.

Moore’s entire published (and unpublished) poetic output comprises a staggering number of sonnets. It has been estimated that in his lifetime he composed over 50,000 of them, and while he often discarded rhyme – and even more often iambic metre – his sonnets retain the developmental structures of the form: the presentation of a subject, whether human, philosophical, or natural, in the opening section, followed by a summation, development of narrative, resolution of argument, or contemplation of meaning or effect in the concluding passage. Many of his sonnets derive their impact from his insights as a doctor into individuals. Here is the opening section of ‘Old men and old women going home on the street car’:

Carrying their packages of groceries in particular
With books under their arms that maybe they will read
And possibly understand, old women lead
Their weaker selves up to the front of the car.

And old men who for thirty years have sat at desks
Survey them harmlessly.
                                         They regard each other
As forgotten sister looks at forgotten brother
On their way between two easily remembered tasks
And that is positively all there is to it. …

In others he describes the seasons, or provides exquisite miniature etched images of nature, as in his sonnet ‘It is winter, I know’:

What if small birds are peppering the sky,
Scudding south with the clouds to an ultimate tip on lands
Where they may peck worms and slugs from moist sands
Rather muddily mixed with salt?
                                                    Or if wind dashes by
Insufferably filled with birds’ indefinable twitter
Not deigning to toy with the oak-twigs that it passes
And treading but lightly on all the delicate grasses
Under trees where crickets are silent, where mad leaves flutter?

The combination of lyrical observation and poetic instinct with clinical and scientific insight is rare and stimulating. Merrill Moore’s best sonnets burst out with a conversational pulse, vivid and often deeply touching. He is a poet well worth exploring.

Loose Canons Four: Merrill Moore: Blue & Yellow Evening at Ostend is the fourth of the Loose Canons pamphlets, a series conceived to draw readers’ attention to poets whose work, once well-known, has fallen into the shadows and become lost to sight. ¶ The edition is of 120 copies, hand-set by Lea Sánchez Milde in Van Dijck for text and display, and printed by her on vintage Holcombe paper to a design by Crispin Elsted, who also selected the poems and offers a biographical note. The pamphlets are sewn into wraps of various St-Armand Canal and other papers. 20 pages. C$120.

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