Of Richard Moore's ten published volumes of poetry, one, A Question of Survival, was nominated for a Pulitzer  Prize. Moore's most recent poetry books include The Mouse Whole: An Epic and Pygmies and  Pyramids. His newest collection of poems, The Naked  Scarecrow, was published by Truman State University Press, New Odyssey Editions, in  the spring of 2000.  He is also the author of a novel, The Investigator, a  collection of essays, The Rule That Liberates,  and translations of Plautus' Captivi in the Johns Hopkins University Complete Roman  Drama in Translation  and Euripedes' Hippolytus in the Penn Greek Drama Series.
 
EP&M Online Bookstore has a substantial selection of Richard Moore's titles available.

Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Moore's first book is a large collection of poems that had been appearing widely for fifteen years in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, The American Scholar, Saturday Review, and nine others. Jacket material by Howard Nemerov, Richard Eberhart, May Swenson, and Dan Wakefield. Foretastes of all of Moore's later styles and subjects are to be found in this collection.

This sequence of 58 regular Petrarchan sonnets is the most accomplished in that number and rhyme scheme in English. Forty were previously published in various magazines. The poems are by turn angry, anguished, and humorous. Overtly personal, they are covertly historical.

This and the previous item are elegant hardcover volumes with transparent acetate covers that fetch $30-40 apiece on the rare book market.

Four narrative poems in blank verse spoken by Aaron Burr, Jay Gould, Archimedes, and Cleopatra (in a characterization that differs fundamentally from both Shakespeare's and Shaw's). As X.J. Kennedy remarks, "Moore sets out to establish a colossal metaphor in setting ancient Rome and expansionist America side by side" and "resoundingly does exactly what he sets himself out to do." The four poems (which are overtly historical and covertly personal) also appeared in periodicals: two in The Georgia Review and the other two in The Southern Review and Orpheus.

These mainly "light," epigrammatic poems begin with a harrowing and haunting—as well as outrageously funny—sequence about one of Moore's divorces. This experience then serves as a comic lens through which to view the rest of life. Almost all the poems appeared in 19 magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Chronicles, The Nation, and Salmagundi.

The Rule That Liberates

These provocative essays on Milton, Poetic Meter, Yeats, Shakespeare and Yvor Winters, "Fanatical Poets and Reasonable Poets," form in Frost and Williams, Old Ballads, Words and Healing, and Poetry and Madness, had all except one been published in "distinguished quarterlies" like the ones at Yale, Iowa, Sewanee, etc.

Almost all the poems appeared in 18 periodicals, including Poetry, Salmagundi, Light, Sparrow, The Classical Outlook, and The Formalist. One would like to say that Moore's humor is no laughing matter, but in spite of their seriousness—sometimes their horror even—these poems continually plunge the reader into hilarity. Richard Wilbur remarks on the jacket, "The best and most serious poetry is full of gaiety, and it is only dreary poets and their too-earnest readers who consider light verse demeaning… if the reader will look at such a delightful and flawless poem as Richard Moore's 'In Praise of Old Wives,' the question of light verse's legitimacy will become academic."

Three volumes in one: Part One, The Education of a Mouse; Part Two, The Marriage of a Mouse; Part Three: The Apotheosis of a Mouse. Completed in 1962, when Moore was 34, and first published in its entirety 34 years later, this fantastically rhyming beast epic and self-mocking Bildungsroman was his discovery of himself as a tragicomic populist poet. Substantial excerpts appeared in Light, Negative Capability, The Ontario Review, and Plains Poetry Journal.

Pygmies and Pyramids

These poems are all in the same unusual meter: strict dactylic-spondaic in the elegaic-couplet pattern from antiquity. The strictness makes this a rhythm that is different from anything heard before in English. Moore uses it to express his ironically animistic views on human development and contemporary consciousness. This unity of subject and the prevailing rhythm cause these individual verse essays, lyrics, and epigrams to coalesce into a single poem of epic-didactic scope. Moore's humor is an integral part of the process. The poems were almost all previously published in 14 journals, including Poetry, Salmagundi, Sewanee Review, and The Denver Quarterly.

This novel has been classified as a mystery and praised for its expertly maintained suspense. Primarily it is a study of characters in an unusual menage and of a man's agonized, absurd, and finally insane quest for "the facts."