From time to time in This Reading, and Writing, Life one can see the end of the current plan coming into sight. One's whole life doesn't consist of reading other people's accounts of their worlds and how they saw them, or providing further versions of one's own, since the necessity of earning a living came to an end but having reading, and writing, projects on the go provide the foundations for fighting off the 'existential' angst of being alive without ordained purpose which can then be augmented with the music, the horse racing and the walking for the sake of coming back again.

Sometimes, despite the vast landscape of literature still left unread - the Cervantes, the Edmund Spenser, the biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins - nothing seems urgent and, coming to a stage at which C20th can be left, like all such big projects of mine, in a first draft on which further work seems beyond me, it's not obvious what I'd do instead.

But then there are days, like yesterday, when anything seems possible. In the most vivid of these brief epiphanies, a poem sometimes emerges but I'm happy with less. It had been suggested that Dylan Thomas should have a chapter in C20th which wasn't the original plan but, yes, he should and without it the account would lack that dimension.

I thought a contrast with Alun Lewis would bring out the salient features of the two of them and give me the chance to side with the lesser-known underdog against the fraudulent windbag which, of course, Dylan wasn't really. And so the 'book' can keep me occupied for a little longer yet and reach 30 thousand words and creep into the category of 'short book' when Motion's book, admittedly only on Larkin, looks a similar length. And early signs are that putting together some pages on Dylan will be as useful to me as setting out some thoughts on Eliot, Heaney and the others that I have. It might make a pdf yet and be regarded as a job done, if not especially well done.

--

Meanwhile, there is never a downside to extending the Elizabeth Bishop section of the library. David Kalstone's Becoming a Poet is as good as any other commentary, and better than some, at re-directing one back to the poems and further enhancing her position among the very most complete poets of the last, and any other, century. It's only now, perhaps, that I feel some sort of grasp of the overall point of what she was doing beyond being impressed by one poem after another without being able to define what it was.

Poetry is at its best when some element remains elusive but unless one can find a certain amount of 'meaning' to nail down it might as well be John Ashbery on who there is no chapter in my monograph. I've sometimes thought of buying his Collected Poems to paddle about in but I don't need hundreds of pages to be mystified by when one poem will do.