The End In Sight

As far as I can remember I've been reading James Merrill's Collected Poems since the beginning of the year and I've now completed all the main books of poems published during his life. But there's still some way to go to get to the end of the Collected. I've just embarked on a longish segment entitled The Yellow Pages. As far as I can figure this comprises poems he left out of the earlier published books but then decided were worthy of publication in a volume of their own duly published in 1974. Then there's a quite a hefty group of JM's translations of other writers, before a final substantial section of poems he never bothered to publish but that his current editors decided needed to be acknowledged as Previously Uncollected Poems. Even with a cursory glance ahead it's clear that even his less substantial stuff is, well, substantial.

So I have to ask myself again, has it been worth spending all this effort on a writer who is sometimes maddeningly opaque? (Or possibly is actually reasonably clear, but so clever he keeps going over my head.) My answer is, again, that I'm not really sure, but something is making me go on and that's enough. And I'd now supplement that with the observation that the more I read, the more I get, the more frequent become the rewards.