Last night's leader's debate - aired on the dastardly Sky News channel - yielded no clear winner. Indeed, the earlier Cleggmania has faded somewhat, as the new dog with the new tricks became old hat. He used names looked into the camera, and basically made the same claims about being different. Ho hum. But Clegg did have clear and different policies on Europe, Trident, and immigration - all left-field and quite brave. Brown was better than I have ever seen him: angry, principled, and informative; he seemed to have a fire in his belly at last. He claimed Nick was anti-American and bad for security, and David anti-Europe and bad for the economy. Cameron - to my mind - was the weakest - though his calm upper-crust "Gap Yah" delivery was at least less shaky than first time out, and he seemed to score points about the campaign literature scare tactics that Brown may or may not have authorised. Eyewear is now on the fence, between Labour and the Lib Dems. I wait to see the last debate next week.
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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