Poems haunt long after they are haunted. The most disturbing poem in Elizabeth Bishop’s first book, North & South (1946), is “The Man-Moth”—this meek creature, so withdrawn he lives in storm drain and subway tunnel, embodied a peculiar modern loneliness years before David Reisman published The Lonely Crowd. Was the Man-Moth hybrid or monster? No one appears to notice him except the poet; indeed, the city where he lurks seems unpopulated. His existence, as in a fairy tale, is never questioned; but his wretchedness and thwarted longing answer something in the poet without declaring it—the poem was anti-confessional long before confessional poetry was born. It opens,

          Here, above,

cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.

The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.

It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,

and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.

He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,

feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,

of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.
 

But when the Man-Moth

pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,

the moon looks rather different to him.

Readers curious about this nocturnal specter were directed to a footnote: “Newspaper misprint for ‘mammoth’ ”—even his birth was an accident. Hunting the Man-Moth requires