Heard on the BBC this morning - English may become "a dead language" in a thousand years, or at least, a minority language, like French. Dear me! I am not sure becoming like French is such a disaster. The English have relied a little too much lately on the soft power of their mother tongue, and it might do us all some corrective good to brush up on our Chinese, and learn some international and cultural humility. That being said, I doubt that the poems and novels of the English language will be as dead as the Greats for some time, and I am sure that this new Classical English, however quaint and obscure, will be studied for a few more thousand years, if only by scholars and saints. Though, it must be said, I am not yet convinced that human civilisation in its present consumerist form will survive.
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. What do I mean by smart?
Comments
Having taught English for over twenty years I know that reports of its forthcoming demise are somewhat exaggerated. People think that English has become the world language purely as a result of colonialism. This is only partly true. Structuarally, English has an astonishing intrinsic power, economy and flexibility. The main problem that foreign learners face is the spelling. Compare it with French which has around half a million nouns where you have to guess the gender because there are no fixed rules. As for Chinese; hardly anyone outside China speaks it and I can't see that changing any time soon.
Best wishes from Simon
Anyway, newspapers are always proclaiming the demise of everything, be it literature, film, the world, English, or earlobe hair.