The Big 50

I'm hoping to provide more than just lists here once again soon. I'm reading Paul Muldoon's Oxford lectures in The End of the Poem at the moment and it's a wonderful book and I'll write about it here eventually even though it isn't new.
In the meantime, in one of those attempts to define oneself I had intended to list the Big 100, my personal helicon of favourites across all genres of artistic endeavour. I soon realized that I'd need to include things that were great but not special to me if I was going to name 100 so I reduced it to 50. But, so far, I've only got 44.Andrew Marvell, David Bowie, Raymond Carver and William Byrd have been removed from the list which, in some sort of order, but not definitively in order, goes like this-

Thom Gunn, Maggi Hambling, The Magnetic Fields, Shakespeare, Philip Larkin, Handel, J.S.Bach, Vermeer, Gerard Depardieu, T.Rex, John Donne, Gregory Isaacs, Patrick Hamilton, Mozart, Mark Rothko, James Joyce, The Velvet Underground, Monteverdi, The Simpsons, Thomas Tallis, Al Green, Sean O'Brien, Emmanuelle Beart, Camus, Josquin Desprez, Ovid, Lindisfarne, Auden, Richard Yates, Edward Thomas, August Kleinzahler, James Macmillan, Peter Brueghel, Thomas Hardy, Sibelius, Buxtehude, Beethoven, J.D.Salinger, Marc Chagall, R.E.M., Vivaldi, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Haruki Murakami, Purcell, and possibly T.S. Eliot. Then maybe George Moore. And Sartre.

So, there it is. The anthology of a lifetime. I've almost certainly missed out something special, I don't know if Danny Baker belongs on such a list. Or Blackadder or Fawlty Towers. Neither can I explain how Sean O'Brien is rated one place ahead of Emmanuelle Beart or The Simpsons just in front of Thomas Tallis. But, while many will rightly question the list-making impulse, others will perhaps sympathize with the affliction and then decide not to attempt to try it themselves.