Back from Ireland. I must stop eating lobster smothered in butter. But those trolley dollies with their heaps of cream and custard and berries! Agggh. Croquet is not, may I add, an aerobic activity...Just read Forster's first, Where Angels Fear to Tread - a bit odd stylistically. Does anyone else have any thoughts on his sentimental-ironic melodramatic tonal shifts? Also enjoyed the first 95% of Netherland, until the cornball London Eye/ family values ending. A missed opportunity to create a true classic. Still, I actually find cricket bearable after that.
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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