Eyewear would like to congratulate Man United on their paper-thin victory over Chelsea last night in Russia. It was moving that the win came on the 50th anniversary of Man United's air disaster. The question of whether evenly-matched contests between strong sides should be determined by penalty shoot-outs has long been debated - as everyone says, it becomes a lottery. But then again, maybe not. The side who wins this way has slightly a) more luck; b) more skill; and c) a depth of manpower able to confront the elements, and the pressure of the moment. That set of gifts will always belong to the better team, on the night.
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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