I am sad to read in today's Guardian that Alice Miller has died. Miller was the author of books that explored and explained the traumas of childhood and children, in ways that took their side against "toxic" parents. As a poet whose early work explored child abuse, and the traumas of infancy and youth - and as a person who was in psychoanalysis for seven years in my twenties - I can only say that Miller's influential quarrel with Freud was significant. However, some of her claims and extreme positions were themselves traumatic. It will be important to sort out her legacy, now that she is gone.
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....
Comments
As someone who works with challenging/vulnerable young people, I have used her theory of the 'enlightened witness' as my guiding principle for years.
Ron Moule