Life

Jane Merchant was an American poet. She was born the Inskip, Tennesse in 1919, now a neighborhood in Knoxville.

As a child she lived on small farm in Strawberry Plains (10 miles east of Knoxville) with her parents and 3 siblings. At an early age, Merchant was diagnosed with Osteogenesis imperfecta (or Brittle Bone Disease). She would live the remainder of their life confined to a bed. Without the opportunity to attend school, she educated herself through exhaustive reading.

While her writings first appeared in 1936 at the age of 17 in a series of letters to Portal, a magazine for young Methodist women, her first publication as a poet did not appear until 1945. In April of that year, she received an honorable mention in the Progressive Farmer Poetry Competition and in August she won the competition outright with her sonnet “No Other Acres.”

Beginning in 1946, Merchant began submitting poems to larger publications. The Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping both purchased poems in 1946 and both magazines would continue a relationship with the poet until her death in 1972.

Her illness, however, began to take its toll on her body. By 1942 Merchant had become completely deaf and by the end of the decade she would be nearly blind. But it was in these years, while fighting the daily struggle against her illness and after dealing with the death of her father in 1949 that she produced some of her most critically acclaimed work, including the collection Halfway Up the Sky.

Despite her confinement to a small room in their Knoxville home, Merchant’s poetry covered a wide range of topics, including the life-long struggle with her disability. Through her poetry she expressed sadness at the horrors of war and violence, sorrow at the inhumanities of racism and segregation, but most importantly she expressed hope and wonder at the natural world around her.

She maintained extensive correspondence with friends, publishers and fans throughout her life, often with the help of her sister Elizabeth who acted as her personal nurse and agent. While her confinement left her at the mercy of letters, radio and newspapers for a glimpse of the outside world, through the windows in her poetry, she gave the world a chance to look through the eyes of the dreamer.

Jane Merchant left a legacy that spanned 10 books and more than 2,000 published poems. Her biography, A Window on Eternity: The Life and Poetry of Jane Hess Merchant, written by Sarah Jorunn Oftedal, was published in 1989 by Abingdon Press.