Yesterday night, the cabinet member James Purnell, made a brave move. He opened the way for those in cabinet, and backbench Labour MPs, to voice their discontent with Gordon Brown. It all seemed to play for. Incredibly, though, instead of rallying to the young visionary's letter today, the fearful Labour cabinet has rallied around their embunkered leader as he accomplishes a semi-shuffle. It's a terrible day for Labour. They seem incapable of not bottling things. Whenever a strong clear decision to lead and make hard choices is called for, they retreat. This was the chance. Now Alan Johnson has been co-opted - a cowardly act on his part, revealing him as venal and small. Britain will likely have another year of this gang - unable to lead, unwilling to move on.
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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