"Omissions Are Not Accidents" Reminiscences

In 1966, an authorization form to approve a new printing of the Collected Poems of Marianne Moore came across my desk at The Macmillan Company. As a senior editor in that company's tradebooks department, a position I held during most of the sixties, it had been my responsibility to authorize new printings of books in the categories which I handled; this included Macmillan's poetry list. Since the company was fortunate in having among its authors poets whose books continued to be in demand-Hardy, Yeats, Robinson, Tagore, Lindsay, Masefield, Teasdale and others-approving new printings, generally in editions of one thousand copies, was a fairly routine task. But when I looked over the form before me and thought of the books Marianne Moore had published since she had changed publishers from Macmillan in 1951 to The Viking Press, I realized that the title Collected Poems was no longer an accurate description. Since leaving Macmillan she had published with The Viking Press Like A Bulwark in 1956; 0 To Be a Dragon in 1959; her translations of The Fables of La Fontaine in 1954-and later that year, in 1966, she was to publish, again with The Viking Press, what turned out to be her last collection of new work, Tell Me, Tell Me. Why should a volume labeled Collected Poems not also include these more recent books?