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?
Sad news. The great TV actor and star of Danger Man and The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan, has died. He was also very good in one of my favourite Alistair MacLean films, Ice Station Zebra - a movie that Howard Hughes was said to have watched hundreds of times in his private cinema. What I didn't know, and this obituary shows, is that McGoohan was also an intelligent writer and director, who turned down the role of James Bond in Dr. No, because of its sexist and thuggish nature. Impressive.
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I'll have to watch Ice Station Zebra. Good to know that McGoohan was a good person.