According to today's Guardian, Lord Byron was actually "overweight and unattractive". This seems like nonsense. The evidence is his weight. He is described as five eight (a handsome size at that time), and weighing in at 76 kg, described as "borderline obese". Not so. According to the NHS site which calculates such things, Byron's BMI would have been 25.48, or, very borderline overweight - not the same as obese, and close to a healthy weight. Byron may have had a slight paunch, but he was no Arbuckle. If he was in fact 13 stone (another figure mentioned) he would have been 29 on the BMI scale; 30 is obese - but this might have been with his heavy medical boots on. At 23, he weighed around 63 kg, which would have made him a very slim weight. This seems like a story without much weight to it.
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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