"A forceful and pertinent contribution to both Moore/Bishop scholarship and to the field of feminist literary criticism" -- Joanne Diehl, Bowdoin College

"[A] wise, informed and eloquent book . . . Her rigorous, scholarly and critical account challenges many of our assumptions about influence in women writers and, more broadly, about our modern heritage." -- Bonnie Costello, Boston University

"With an acute, poet's attention, Jeredith Merrin traces the intricate links between feminism and tradition, history and creation, work and meaning, in the poetry of Moore and Bishop. An Enabling Humility is a well-written, revealing wok of criticism, worthy of its subject." -- Robert Pinksy, poet.

Rutgers University Press 1990

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Selected Articles and Chapters

  • To Explain Grace Requires a Curious Hand’: Marianne Moore and the Literary Tradition . Poesis 6.1 (1984): 16-39.
  • Teaching Marianne Moore . Sagetrieb (Winter 1987): 163-67.
  • Re-Seeing the Sea: Marianne Moore's ‘A Grave’ as a Woman Writer's Re-Vision . Marianne Moore: Woman and Poet, ed. Patricia C. Willis. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation. 155-167.
  • Elizabeth Bishop: Gaiety, Gayness, and Change . Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender, ed. Marilyn May Lombardi. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993. 153-172.
  • Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore . The Columbia History of American Poetry, ed. Jay Parini and Brett C. Millier. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 343-369.
  • Yehuda Amichai: Down to Earth . Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought, ed. Murray Baumgarten. 45:3 (1996): 287-297.
  • Sites of Struggle: Marianne Moore and American Calvinism . The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era, ed Aliki Barnstone, Michael Tomasek Manson, and Carol J. Singley. Hanover: The University Press of New England, 1997. 91-106.
  • The Ballad of Charlotte Mew.  Modern Philology 95:2 (November 1997): 200-217.
  • ‘And Damned If It’s Not a Hart Crane-Azure Sky’: Some Notes on American Modernism and Influence . Poetry International VI (2002): 159-171.
  • Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth Bishop: the Same Planet.  Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell & Co., ed. Suzanne Ferguson.  Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003.  41-57.

Reviews

  • The Limits of Mortality: David Ferry's Gilgamesh . The Threepenny Review: XV:1 (Spring 1994): 9-10.
  • The Poetry Man . Review/essay on Kenneth Koch’s Straits, The Southern Review 35:2 (Spring, 1999): 403-409.
  • Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, and Chana Bloch’s Mrs. Dumpty . The Southern Review 36:1 (Winter 2000): 208-214.
  • Art Over Easy . Review of Billy Collins’ Sailing Alone Around the Room. The Southern Review 38:1 (Winter 2002): 202-214. Sample pages
  • John Clare for the Twenty-First Century. The Southern Review 40:4 (Autumn 2004):  829-841