Thomas Merton was born in France in 1915. During the 1930’s he was working for the communist cause, in 1941 he became a Trappist monk in Kentucky and he published his first collection of verse, Thirty Poems, in 1944. By the time of his death in 1968, Merton was already being considered by many scholars and academics to be the most important Catholic writer working in America in the 20th century. Merton’s bibliography includes one novel, three autobiographies and a number of books and meditations covering a wide range of spiritual topics. In addition to excelling in non-fiction, however, Merton was an accomplished poet, publishing almost a dozen collections of verse.
Thirty Poems reveals a strong influence by the mystical symbolism of William Blake. By the 1960’s, Merton’s social and political activism was on full display, though as far back as the 1950’s controversial night club comic had regularly been reading Merton’s “A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolph Eichmann” as part of his act. Merton’s prose had long been infused with a keen awareness of the existential crises mandated by the awareness of social inequities, but his poetry had till then seemed a safe a place for meditation and contemplation on a sphere elevated above the prosaic problems outside the monastery. The turbulent decade that changed everything else changed Merton’s focus and soon he was a loud voice raising poetic arguments against America’s involvement in Vietnam.
The poems that mark the collections published before his premature death at age 53 show an increasing interest in another mainstay of the 1960’s: Eastern religion. The staunch, but hardly dogmatic Catholic monk weds element of Zen and Taoist philosophy into his doctrinal Christianity expressiveness.
In 1977, a decade after his death, a comprehensive volume coming in at more than 1,000 pages was published: The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton.
Poetry Collections by Thomas Merton:
Thirty Poems. 1944.
A Man in the Divided Sea. 1946.
Figures for an Apocalypse. 1948.
The Tears of the Blind Lions 1949.
The Strange Islands. 1957.
Selected Poems. 1959.
Emblems of a Season of Fury 1963.
Cables to the Ace; or, Familiar Liturgies of Misunderstanding. 1968.
The Geography of Lograire. 1969.
The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton. 1977.
