Catholics are not as impressed by Bible-reading, but I grew up a Protestant, before converting, and am familiar with the King James Bible, along with Shakespeare, what you get when you are stranded on BBC's Desert Island. Today it has been acted out on Radio 4 (BBC), and has been impressive (if at times, even for a literate Christian poet, tedious). There is an urge to render the Bible a secular document of immense poetic value, which, secondarily, it has become, and Ecclesiastes, especially, reminds me how much of Roth's Nemesis is (literally) biblical. Without this great Judaeo-Christian work, as we all know (and are endlessly told), there could be no meaningful English literature, which, at any rate, only becomes mainly or mostly post-King James post-Beckett, and not even then. Good to have British radio opened up to the Word of God. At the least, it'll do wonders for a new generation of poets.
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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