David Davis has done something new in British politics today. His resignation, on principle, with a plan to refight for his seat as an MP, against the 42-day limit for arrest under new government "anti-Terror" legislation, isn't the usual parliamentary tactic, and seems, further, to have caught even David Cameron off-guard. Davis is in uncharted, and mostly unsupported, waters here. On the one hand, he may be admired for sticking to his guns, or mocked or more for gesture politics. If he wins, he may be better placed to challenge Cameron, at some point, for leadership of his party; a loss could signal oblivion, or some sort of quasi-obscure UKIP identity. What matters, though, is this act is dramatic, and calls attention to the authoritarian heartbeat of Brown's horrific government.
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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