Literary Hub Introduces Readers to Sister Mary Bernetta Quinn

Nick Ripatrazone writes about nun and poet Sister Mary Bernetta Quinn, in an article recently published at Literary Hub. "On Good Friday, 1934, 18-year-old Viola Roselyn Quinn felt inspired by the Chapel of St. Mary of the Angels, a grand church on the campus of the College of St. Teresa. Later that year she entered the Franciscan Sister of the Congregation of Our Lady of Lourdes, and took the name Mary Bernetta. She would go on to teach at several colleges until her retirement in 1983, and published books of scholarship on Modernist poets," Ripatrazone writes. From there, Ripatrazone describes her rich epistolary relationship with some of the great poets of her day: 

She also wrote letters. In addition to her correspondence with Stevens, Sister Bernetta exchanged letters with Denise Levertov, William Carlos Williams, Robert Penn Warren, James Wright, Seamus Heaney, and others. She read their work with skilled attention, and they responded to her with sincerity and gratitude.

In September 1948, Stevens again wrote Sister Bernetta with a note of appreciation, saying “I cannot tell you how happy it made me to think that my poems have given any pleasure to a woman of your intelligence and goodwill.” In 1949, she sent him an Easter card that included a reference to the lion of Judah (a symbolic figure for Christ from the Book of Revelation)—which he then included in his poem “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.”

She would continue to send Stevens letters at Easter and Christmas. His December response in 1951 is lyric. Hartford was “covered with snow and ice . . . But we have been having the most saintly moonlight nights.” Tired of the “roaring” of the Christmas season, he envied the “loneliness” of Sister Bernetta’s empty college campus, where “one can collect one’s self and no doubt, in your case, collect a great deal more.” In other letters, he expressed gratitude that Sister Bernetta’s “notes bring me into contact with something that I should not have otherwise except for them.” Her letters “seem to come from something fundamental, something isolated from this ruthless present.”

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