Eyewear salutes Philip Gross, for winning the latest TS Eliot Prize (worth £15,000) for poetry, for his collection The Water Table, from Bloodaxe - the publisher whose Jen Hadfield also won last year. The Eliots is becoming exciting, since dark horses and underdogs are seemingly now as likely to win as poets with names like Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. This instability of critical consensus is a good thing for UK poetry, and it is refreshing for a fine serious and dedicated poet like Gross to win.
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?
Comments
I couldn't agree with you more! It is so refreshing when an outsider wins one of these coveted poetry prizes. Does this mean that the hermetic cliques of British poetry - which are way past their best-before date - are belatedly being broken up?
Best wishes from Simon