When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
POETRY, POLITICS, PROVOCATION AND POPULAR CULTURE SINCE 2005 - 19 YEARS AND over 7 million visits - British Library-archived
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As I get even more irrelevant, a belated happy birthday wish to you, Todd! You were born in the year of the horse. You have the same sign as the following personages: Michael Moore, Sarah Polley, Hu Jintao, Boris Yeltsin, and Ang Lee. I have been getting a bit obsessed with this matter of the Chinese Zodiac for the past couple of days, as you might gather from my website. Wikipedia has a good set of descriptions of Chinese astrology, as well.
Cheers, mate. I hope your is a wonderful year! I am happy to see that you are still achieving many many successes despite all the challenges, past, present, and future!