Eyewear supported the Lib Dems in the last election. And, has now switched allegiances, tentatively, back to Labour, who have done the right thing and renewed themselves. I wish to give their new leader the benefit of the doubt. Ed Miliband has got several things right, it seems to me: 1) he has expressed regret for Labour going into Iraq as it did; 2) he admits Labour lost the election and has to be humble and truly listen; 3) he is putting the true middle class (and working class) concerns of the British people ahead of the well-to-do; 4) he supports universal welfare as a principle; 5) he is not knee-jerk anti-union; 6) he signals the end of New Labour and Blair-Brown division and wants a new generation to move on. He is a thoughtful, sympathetic, strong-willed, well-educated, expressive leader, with the "charisma of imperfection" as he puts it. An excellent foil for his equally well-educated and articulate opposite numbers, Clegg and Cameron. The next five years will be interesting times indeed, and in Ed, the UK has found the person to properly and fully counter the vicious ideologically-driven cuts to come.
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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