I left Thursday night to go cross-country skiing in the mountains of Central Norway, along the Peer Gynt Trail, following in the footsteps of Scott, who trained at Fefor Hotel for his polar expedition (it is near enough the Arctic circle to afford the requisite extreme conditions). Returning this morning on the 7.40 flight from Oslo (seated near Jeremy Clarkson, thereby putting me in a bind - should I not want the plane to crash?) I found that the Irish government farcical, Alan Johnson cuckolded and replaced by Ed Balls (the phallic puns just roll off the tip of the uhm tongue), and Mr Cameron mired in his own Watergate scandal of sorts (his spokesman resigning, he partying with Murdoch), Obama back up in the polls, and Palin down. Gosh.
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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