Yesterday, British PM David Cameron stood in parliament and did a noble thing - took complete heed of the truth of a situation and morally spoke out, calling the Bloody Sunday massacre "unjustified and unjustifiable". This was a brave and correct step, and not entirely what one might have expected from a Tory; many in the military establishment, for instance, are being more ambiguous already. Meanwhile, speaking of military men, General Petraeus, in America, being grilled by none other than Senator McCain, fainted, when asked when troops would leave Afghanistan; in an instant of perhaps minor weakness, the unfortunate soldier may have disbarred himself from a presidential run in 2012. Some commentators think the report into Bloody Sunday signals the end of British imperial adventures, an end to an often shameful colonial past. Not quite. The guns are still abroad, in Afghanistan, for example. And the Queen - for good and ill - is still on the Canadian dollar. Vestiges maybe. But the sun has not yet set, just yet.
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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