Nick Clegg, Deputy PM, stood at the disptach box yesterday for Prime Minister's Questions and called the Iraq War "illegal" - something I have been writing (and saying in print) since 2003. This is an odd moment. Yesterday the ex-head of MI5 said much the same thing. It appears that the cracks in the Establishment are showing. However, Clegg has backtracked - since most Tories supported the war, and Cameron - he can hardly do otherwise and remain in government. Still, it was a glorious slip of the tongue. Will time tell the truth? Will Tony Blair ever face the justice meted out to Saddam?
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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