Let us not compare riots - Haiti is currently facing tragedy as it collapses into cholera-induced anarchy - and the international cyber-rioting against major online retailers continues - so that some paint and such thrown at the future King of England and his wife might seem small beer. Except, let us catch our breath, and reflect: when was the last time that Royalty in England was in such immediate peril? We now have a face for this upsurge of rage against these pitiless penny-pinching prunings. Students of the world unite! Meanwhile, China has shown itself to be Philistine Numero Uno for its bald and bold retorts to the Nobel prize. What a week. Just wait until Burma gets nukes...
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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Charles and Camilla encountering the (non stage-managed) general public on their way to the London Paladium gave us all a vicarious whiff of what life might have been like during the French and Russian revolutions.
Best wishes from Simon