“Unswayed by fripperies of priestly pomp”: Vassar Miller the Episcopalian

Vassar Miller was a distinguished poet, disability rights activist, a life-long resident of Houston, and for much of her life, an Episcopalian. In 1961, she was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was later Poet Laureate of Texas. Miller produced nine volumes of poetry; her Collected Poems were published by Southern Methodist University Press in 1991. In addition, she edited what is thought to be the first of its kind: a literary anthology exploring physical disability, Despite This Flesh: the Disabled in Stories and Poems (UT Press, 1985).

Despite such critical recognition, Miller has slipped into obscurity. This year’s Costan Lectures are based on original research using in part her almost completely unmined papers held at the University of Houston, as well as her published works. Miller lived with severe cerebral palsy, which impacted her speech and mobility. She became a disability rights activist with a national reach, as well as in her native Texas and within her Houston parish. A significant amount of her poetry explores what might be called ‘conventional’ religious themes reminiscent of George Herbert, such as the church year, sacraments, prayer, and the priesthood. But her work also interrogates – without sentimentality – a salvation narrative which allows the suffering and isolation caused by severe disability. Miller reflected – perhaps ironically, perhaps not – that she felt more discriminated against by literary critics in the 1960s-1980s for writing poetry about Christian and biblical subjects than as a disabled person. In the centenary year of her birth, it is hoped these lectures will introduce her to a new and wider audience. Vassar Miller, the woman and her work, call out for rediscovery.

Judith Maltby is Emerita Fellow of Corpus Christi College (where she was the College Chaplain for thirty years) and Emerita Reader in Church History in the University of Oxford. Her publications include Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan in early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998); Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2006, co-editor Chris Durston); The Established Church: Past, Present and Future (T&T Clark, 2011) (co-editors Mark Chapman and William Whyte). Her more recent work focuses on the literary history of Anglicanism: Anglican Women Novelists: Charlotte Brontë to PD James (Bloomsbury, 2019), co-edited with Alison Shell. She is now engaged in a book length study of the Episcopalian poet and disability rights activist, Vassar Miller. Born and brought up in the Episcopal Church, Judith has lived in England since her doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge in the 1980s and was amongst the first women to be ordained to the priesthood in the Church of England in 1994. She has been a member of the Church of England’s General Synod since 2010.

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