A curious incident this morning: as Eyewear came home from Heathrow by cab, around 7 am, I spotted a handsome youngish man in a dark designer suit bicycling alone in North Kensington. It was the Leader of the Opposition and likely future PM Mr David Cameron. Not wasting a moment, I asked the driver to stop, stepped out and briefly chatted with the somewhat startled cyclist. I wished him a sporting good luck, and he thanked me, and sped off. Oddly, and impressively, he seemed genuinely unattended by ostentatious security of any kind. Sometimes the UK is impressive for its eccentric and open ways - suggestive that Britain is not all that broken. Note, thought, he was not wearing a helmet! And, on top of Sam Cam's lack of a seat belt the other day, that's a security risk too far. Safety first, lady and gentleman, please!
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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