As seen at the blog Harriet - a link to news that the great(est) American poet of the last century, Mr TS Eliot, had trouble at Harvard with his studies - in short, he got far fewer As and Bs than we might have expected. Instead, the no doubt day-dreaming, perhaps anxious, maybe even sleepy, Mr Eliot, missed classes, got a D, and seemed to be on academic probation. Mr Eliot, unique in being both a charlatan and a genius, often in the same essay, or sentence, was a master of verbal erudition that displayed more than it actually said - the reverse of subtext - he was the lord of the overtext. He also abandoned his PhD work, and, famously, went on to work in a bank, edit books at Faber, pen essays, plays, and the most famous difficult poem of the last two centuries in English, and, win the Nobel Prize. I too was a piss-poor undergrad student who got through on a wing and a prayer, as were (I would guess) several other poets. Poets have a habit of missing deadlines, over-writing or under-writing essays, and crumpling up bits of paper in their pockets. They sometimes drop out, or become professors. Or not. But it is charming to know that, 100 years ago this month, Old Possum was just a young dolt.
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
I'm betting this was a common experience.
Attending Oxbridge has left me with a massive scepticism about formal education. Leaving university prematurely doesn't seem to have harmed characters like Bill Gates. Many of the most brilliant people I know either got thirds or dropped out altogether.
Best wishes from Simon