David Cameron, British PM, has been over there in the US of A this week, bigging down his role as a junior partner. Not a history boy, Cameron yesterday talked about, on TV no less, how Britain was even junior partner in fighting the Nazis in 1940. Well, maybe to the Russians, but not the Yanks. As every schoolchild knows, or once did, the Americans only entered in 1941, after Pearl Harbour. Instead, the 1940 war period was Britain's "finest hour". I wonder, will Cameron also acknowledge that WH Auden is really American, and thank the States for loaning "us" Eliot? Indeed, is British poetry, postwar, junior partner to the American stream?
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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