Sad news. Frank Kermode, one of the greatest of English-language literary critics, has died, aged 90. Kermode, along with A. Alvarez, William Empson, Leavis, Ricks, and a handful of others, managed to make 20th century British criticism - while more elegant and fathomable than its continental counterparts - as interesting, engaged, and vibrant as any body of such work anywhere. Kermode's writing was brilliant, to be sure, and inspiring, and I found many of his books and essays a significant part of my growing-up process as a writer, poet, reader, and critic. Especially major, to my mind, was his book The Sense of an Ending. Also important, for me, and others, of course, were The Romantic Image, Wallace Stevens (the first serious English approach to this American master), and his History and Value, based on the Clarendon lectures. His more recent work include d last years revisionary take on EM Forster. English letters has lost one of its signal geniuses, one with an appetite for poetry.
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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Itzik Basman