Iraq seems to be coming to the streets of London. Is this the way the West will end?
Iraq seems to be coming to the streets of London.
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....
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Let's raise our stanzas in rebellion against the mainstream narrative, that says over and over again, that we are "isolated egos competing for the most of what each of us wants" (quote attributed to the author of 'Science and the Moral Life' published in 1949) and therefore our only option is to go out and conquer as much of the world's resources as we want.