Readers of Eyewear may cock an eyebrow at the title of this post - I am a struggling Catholic, after all. However, today seems a bleak day in human history - by no means the worst, but one of those that marks the ways in which human suffering is accidentally and intentionally visited upon people, often innocent. Exhibit A - the peaceful, decent and civilised city of Christchurch in New Zealand is shattered by an earthquake. Exhibit B - the brutality in Libya. Exhibit C - Iranian warships steaming into the Mediterranean for the first time in over 30 years. Surely, war of some kind is at hand, in the Middle East - chaos looms. Meanwhile, God, in his infinite wisdom, is apparently impassive as the horrors of history unfold. It is up to each of us (with our souls) to try to fathom the impossible, the infinite. Some days I am just, barely, able to glimpse the love of God working in the world. It is, still, visible, in the kindness and compassion and creativity of so many humans; but too often rubbed out by nature's wild cruelty, and humanity's own madness.
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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