OUTSPOKEN WITH FAMOUS POETS

To end this month, our last nun-poet is SISTER BERNETTA QUIN.  Like  Jessica Powers, also a native of Wisconsin, Sister Bernetta, born in 1915, was a prolific writer.  She was acclaimed by Flannery O’Connor and kept long correspondences with many of the best poets of her generation, including Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Seamus Heaney.

She entered the Franciscan Congregation of Our Lady of Lourdes in 1934, right out of High School and made profession of vows three years later. She earned a B.A. from the College of St. Teresa in 1942,  an M.A. in English from Catholic University in 1944, and a doctorate in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1952.

Sister Bernetta was a teacher throughout her adult life, first on the elementary and secondary levels and later at many colleges, including Norfolk State College, the University of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo, and Allen University. From 1954 to 1967 she was a member of the English Department faculty at the College of St. Teresa in Winona,Minn.

She also authored several scholarly studies of Modernist poetry, including The Metamorphic Tradition in Modern Poetry (1955); Ezra Pound: An Introduction to the Poetry (1972); and Randall Jarrell (1981), as well as numerous scholarly articles and book reviews.

In 1983 she retired to Assisi Heights in Rochester, Minnesota, and that same year published a small collection of poems, --dancing in stillness. In 1997 she celebrated her diamond jubilee as a Franciscan Sister. Sister Mary Bernetta Quinn died at Assisi Heights on February 24, 2003.

According to Nick Ripatrazone (in Literary Hub, July 27, 2018),  in 1948, Wallace Stevens received a letter from Sister Mary Bernetta in which she enclosed some notes on his poetry.  He wrote back: “It is a relief to have a letter from someone that is interested in understanding…I do seek a centre and expect to go on seeking it.”


Later he wrote her: “I am not an atheist although I do not believe to-day in the same God in whom I believed when I was a boy.”   And yet this great American poet did convert to Catholicism, and one wonders what part Sister Bernetta played.