More Moore

 One collateral benefit of writing C20th, my overly ambitious attempt to provide my account of the poetry in English of the period, has been the discoveries, and re-discoveries, found along the way. It's actually much harder work than it looks and a perfect illustration of Homer Simpson's maxim that if something's hard to do it's not worth doing. But if the end result doesn't justify the time spent on it then re-engaging with the 'major' names and concocting reassessments of them has been enlightening for me.

Next year will begin with Marianne Moore for me, prompted by putting in a paragraph or so on the relationship- friendship-  Elizabeth Bishop had with her. If poetry really was the competitive sport that competitions and lists of 'greatests' sometimes make it appear to be, then it is the adorable and paragon example of Elizabeth Bishop that wins the C20th for me. I think Auden and Larkin are in a photo-finish for second place. But even if it is only on the strength of two poems, Poetry and The Steeple-Jack, I thought Ms. Moore was the ideal candidate for further enquiry once the last Stevie Smith book is put on the shelf and so I ordered the Complete Poems, the biography and Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell by David Kalstone. I checked the shelves to confirm that I don't already have the last of those but it wasn't until out this afternoon that I remembered I do, of course, have the Collected Ms. Moore. I hope my attempt to cancel that order gets noticed in time. I am becoming increasingly vague about what I have and what I don't. If I were to live into old age I'd quite possibly end up with shelves of multiple copies of books I was never sure whether I had them or not. 

The first week or so of a New Year can seem to be like emerging bleary-eyed into some sort of new beginning but it's not. Years could be said to begin on one's birthday, or at Rosh Hashanah, and I see that the Islamic New Year is in July but whether we need one at all is open to question. Reading more Marianne Moore represents no sort of new start, she's just next off the taxi rank for a more detailed look and fits well with this profile of less than gregarious figures, like Stevie, Elizabeth and Larkin, who saw fit to devote themselves to their solitary art at least as much as they did to imposing themselves on others. 

I'm sorry that Stevie didn't get an index label to the postings on here regarding her but, strictly speaking, those labels are for poets and it is her prose fiction I've been concerned with. Thus, we'll set one up for Ms. Moore because poetry was what she did, in the hope that there will be more, much more about Moore, to say.