Stanley Moss, a "lyrical American poet who for seven decades evoked a troubled world of sorrows and sensual pleasures ruled by a silent God seemingly indifferent to the fate of humanity," died July 5 at age 99, the New York Times reported. Moss sold his work to periodicals for 20 years before his first collection, The Wrong Angel, was published in 1966. He eventually published 16 poetry collections, the last of which was Always Alwaysland, released on his 97th birthday.
His other books include The Skull of Adam (1979), The Intelligence of Clouds (1989), A History of Color: New and Collected Poems (2003), Songs of Imperfection (2004), God Breaketh Not All Men's Hearts Alike (2011), It's About Time (2015), Almost Complete Poems (2016), Abandoned Poems (2018), Act V, Scene I (2020), and Not Yet (2021).
In 1948, Moss became an editor at New Directions, and was later a drinking friend of the poet Dylan Thomas. Moss, who spoke Italian and Spanish, lived in Rome in the 1960s and early '70s. He was a contributing editor for the Rome literary journal Botteghe Oscure and taught English in Rome and Barcelona. In New York in 1977, he founded Sheep Meadow Press, which published poetry books by Hayden Carruth, Stanley Kunitz, Stephen Berg, and others, the Times noted.
In 1969, Moss befriended the heirs of an Italian nobleman who, after his death, had left a trove of Spanish and Italian old master paintings. Starting as an agent for the nobleman's heirs, Moss began selling art to major museums and became prosperous enough to finance his life as a poet.
"When I started selling art, I had no money or training," he said in a 2005 interview. "I have a gift for finding old masters. I have discovered pictures that now hang in the Louvre that I bought for nothing. It takes taste and brains.... How do I balance my careers as a poet and a dealer? I have the advantage of not having to sleep much."
"Moss may or may not be accurately termed a religious poet," the British poet Carol Rumens wrote in the Guardian in 2015. "If he's a religious poet, he's one of the too-few irreligious kind, firmly of this world in his vivid pleasures and sorrows, joyfully harrying God from myth to unsatisfactory myth, denomination to denomination, fascinated by the whole subject of deity but hardly expecting a catch or kill."
