The pulse of 20th century British poetry's durability - and sometime light, popular touch - can be taken today, as the death of the most famous tennis-playing woman in poetic history was announced: that of Miss J. Hunter Dunn, who, of course, inspired Poet Laureate John Betjeman to compose his most-beloved poem, "A Subaltern's Love Song". It might only be traditional verse, but it was musical, brilliantly witty, swooningly (if realistically) romantic, and oh-so gin-and-lime middle class. There may be "poetry wars", but somewhere there is also a Britain that needed such poems, and, thankfully, got them. Growing up, I loved this poem, and was moved, to hear it mentioned on the BBC this morning - and sad that Miss Hunter Dunn had died. As I've said before, the heart belongs in poetry, too - and sentiment - and a great challenge for the 21st century is to try to find ways to intelligently combine feeling, and complexity, in poetry, so that it neither stales, nor panders, while also communicating (if only sometimes) with readers, in the world.
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?
Comments
good to know someone cared enough to script it (not the death of a poet, but the death of a muse) and to read the poem. She was, I think 92...