The major British actor Deborah Kerr, pictured, has died. Her great period was arguably the decade between 1943 and 1953, when she appeared in some of the era's finest (and biggest) motion pictures made in England or America, such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus, Quo Vadis, King Solomon's Mines, and From Here To Eternity. However, for another fourteen years after that, she appeared in a few interesting, popular or significant films, such as The King and I and Casino Royale, before effectively ending her film career in 1969. As such, she worked steadily for roughly thirty years in cinema, before returning in late life to do a few roles for TV and lesser movies. Never quite an icon, she was still a star.
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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