Canon Dr Giles Fraser, of St Paul's, is resigning, after his welcoming (and Christian) approach to the anti-capitalist encampment outside his door became antithetical to the mercantile needs of those higher up in his church. Given Christ's infamous attack on the money traders of his time, and capitalism's dehumanising effects, Fraser is both prophetic and right, and the failure in his ecclesiastical community to appreciate his good zeal is timidity amok.
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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