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....
The new Bond film's title has been revealed, and it is Qauntum of Solace. No, really. I am impressed. This is a talking point - the weirdest title of a mainstream film since The Silence of the Lambs, and surely much weirder than that. This may be up there with "A Toccata of Gallupi's" or something quarkian from Joyce.
Comments
evidently, it's one of the last unused original Fleming titles, but i also suspect it was chosen so they could create the iconic 007 with the O in "of" and the O in "Solace". i wouldn't be a bit surprised to learn that the choice is as simple as that.
Kimmy