The introduction into the Australian election of an "after the Queen's death" scenario is tacky and tasteless. Either republicanism in Australia has the courage of its convictions or not, but such wishy-washy hypotheticals as this simply are rude and meaningless.
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....
Comments
I think it's a very sensible way of going about things. Why should some multimillionaire aristocrat be the head of state of a country 12000 miles away?
When she is dead, the monarchy should just retire from public life. They are not needed and the original Labour principle was to abolish the house of lords, but the sell-out kids and grandkids of the founding socialists, don't have the same principles and would rather fawn over pple born with a silver spoon and subsidised by the taxpayer.
Why should the Windsors be the biggest welfare recipients in the UK? It isn't fair.