Sad news. The great English poet, R.F. Langley, has died. I wrote about his work here a few years ago. Here one can find him reading. One can purchase The Face of It here directly from Carcanet.
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?
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To be taught by him was to be taught to see the world with new eyes. He challenged the young mind, teaching – in a way that is simply impossible in the brave new educational world of today – As You Like It, Spenser, Carlos Williams and Beckett's Molloy in what is now called Year 9; Wuthering Heights, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, Hopkins' Journals/Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves, Donne, Herbert, Oppen, Ed Dorn and Olson’s “Kingfishers” in Year 10; with Wordsworth, Henry James, Pope, Shakespeare, Prynne in the Sixth, seasoned with Pevsner, Panofsky, the meaning of Michelangelo's Medici Tombs, F T Prince, Rakosi, Adrian Stokes, Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and a dash of Melanie Klein thrown in along the way as one entered the Sixth. He formed the sensibility of many of us. He taught us how to feel and how to think.
Like so many of his former pupils, I remember with much affection the devotion of at least a week's lessons to the first line of a Shakespeare play, whether Barnardo's "Who's there?" or Philo's "Nay, but this dotage of our general's, o'erflows the measure". For many of us, the implications of these lines formed our sensibilities, just as the discipline of intellectual rigour and meticulous attention to detail informed our analytical practices.
He has left school and nobody cares about his motives now. Some sort of dancer has been here, who perched and glowed and whizzed and picked the pepper out of the closing air.