Aslan, of course, was reborn thanks to an older magic; and in Holy Week it is good to know that some forces are at work to counteract the far newer atheism. Madeleine Bunting's thoughtful piece in The Guardian considers ways that scepticism of religion can be more creatively nuanced, and how even Andrew Motion wonders at what it would be like to believe. More importantly, she reminds her readers that religious faith can be a constantly enacted process - not a dumb-list of things to obey - and, for the Christian, must ultimately be about love - a love that forgives and is kind.
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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