Jane Merchant (1919-1972)
Jane Merchant (2)
Invalid of flesh (but not of soul),
She saw Creation whole,
And hymned the seasons come to pass
Beyond her bedroom window-glass—
December trees—and April rain-wet grass.
~
Jane Hess Merchant was born in 1919 on a dairy farm outside of Knoxville. She was the
youngest of four children. Her family lived on farms in Knox County and Jefferson County
until she, her mother, and her sister Elizabeth moved to Knoxville after her father's
death in 1949. Jane was confined to her bed at age twelve due to the congenital bone
disease Osteogenesis Imperfecta, which made her bones extremely brittle and thus prevented
virtually all physical activity. Indeed, what little of the outside world Jane saw was
from her parents' arms when they carried her outside as a child. The same disease that
confined Jane to her bed also caused her to go deaf at the age of twenty-three. She lived
with her mother and sister Elizabeth, who cared for her until her death.
Although many people may have considered Jane to be hopelessly crippled and thus to be
treated as an object of pity, she was extremely active in the literary world until her
death on January 3, 1972. She wrote more than 3,000 poems, over 2,000 letters, dozens of
prose pieces, and published ten collections of her poetry. Jane did not consider herself
pitiful in any way: as the Reverend Gordon Sterchi put it at her funeral, "no one who knew
Jane pitied her or thought her life dreary. They understood that her life was more joyful
that their's [sic]. They realized that she saw more from the bed than they saw from the
boulevards."
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