I have been reading Walcott's 14th - White Egrets - published in his 80th year by Faber. This may be the finest late work in the English high modern lyric tradition since Yeats. Heaney will be set an example to follow by this well-wrought confession. The symbolic resonance of an old man's lusty, deteriorating memories and regrets (the egrets of the title) act as leitmotifs, along with the white horses of the sea, painting, palms, European and Carribean cities and ports, light, time, and poets and poetry - and death shadowing all. This book is a lofty collection whose each poem interlocks and interleaves with its neighbours, offering a particularly fragrant, emotive and sensuous experience of mood, place, and purpose. Both profoundly sad and inspiring, it is canonical writing of the highest level. An etude of loss, disease, desire, and post-colonialism. Do search it out.
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