Is anyone else getting fed up with this new Coalition? Yes. Unrest is brewing. The daily announcements of ever-more-brutal cuts more extreme than anything Thatcher tried - trying to downsize the State to below 40% - are becoming startling in their doomsday black comedy - the latest plan is to sell of England's natural reserves - its forests and waterways - to private companies to look after. Cameron speaks with a forked tongue - yesterday he suggested that tourism was the future - today his government seems to be dooming the UK's leading tourist charms - its natural beauty spots - to second-rate husbandry, or worse. This government will be a disaster, and we have to wait until 2015 to toss it out.
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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