I thought you'd want to know how it ended.The bottom shelf didn't take long.
Auden took up the left-hand side with MacNeice and I kept the Classical section on the right. Dylan Thomas and some WW2 come in between, Alun Lewis the best of them. So Betjeman, of which there are several, is in behind, and then Americans - Richard Wilbur, WCW, O'Hara, Emily Dickinson, Weldon Kees, Delmore Schwartz - before some Europeans are next door to the Latin - Symborska, Heine, Baudelaire, Laforgue.
Edward Thomas stayed over on the shelves with the previous centuries, where his prose books outnumber the poetry and he sits next to Chaucer for no good reason except that that's how it happened.
I feel a sense of achievement and, when I pass that bookcase, an improved level of self-worth.
