Sad news. One of the greatest film composers has died. Jarre created the music for three of the most sweeping Lean epics - Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, and A Passage to India - as well as countless other films and TV series (such as the classic Jesus of Nazareth) - some of rather mediocre quality at best. But his best scores (including Topaz, Witness, and The Year of Living Dangerously) are unforgettable and always improved the films they were composed for. Most significantly, the marriage of the desert imagery and his momentous music, in Lawrence, must count as some of the most romantic cellulloid ever.
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?
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