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?
Avid readers of Eyewear will recall that last Saturday brought some issues with The Guardian's coverage of poetry in Britain. This Saturday, the Oxford-based poet, Alan Buckley (who will be reading for the Oxfam series this Autumn), replies, with a published letter.
Comments
It all makes for interesting reading and it's certainly good to hear it being given a wider airing here.
I can't help but think when I hear persons such as Martin Amis declaring the death of poetry that we're in for another round of evaluation, re-evalution and general head-nodding and shaking. I'm sure every generation does this.
Another post you wrote, I think about C. Day Lewis, struck home with me when I picked up an anthology compiled around the early part of the 20thc. Most of the poets I had never heard of, and the overwhelming style of the book leaned towards the safe styling of the 19thc. Ah, I thought, here is another editor content to sit with the status quo, rather than challenge it.
Anyhoo, this wee comments box was never designed to contain 'thoughts on what makes poetry poetry,' but it is nice to be provoked.