Stanley Moss, Poet Who Evoked a Troubled World, Dies at 99

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 on Friday in New City, N.Y., in Rockland County. He was 99.

His death, at a rehabilitation and nursing center, was announced by his son, Tobia Milla Moss.

In the notoriously hard business of poetry, Mr. Moss sold his work to periodicals for 20 years before his first collection, “The Wrong Angel,” was published in 1966, when he was 41. He eventually published 16 books of collected poetry, ending with “Always Alwaysland,” published on his 97th birthday in 2022.

Even after he was noticed, it was a struggle. At 52, he founded a poetry publishing company in New York. It barely covered his expenses.

But by then, an old connection had come to his rescue. In 1969, he 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, he began selling art to the Louvre, the Prado, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty and other major museums. As a result, he became prosperous enough to finance his life as a poet.

“When I started selling art, I had no money or training,” he told Dylan Foley in 2005 for a blog called The Last Bohemians. “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.”