It's been reported that a new book on the life of Keats suggests he was drowsy and inspired by opiates far longer than had been hitherto claimed, particularly in 1818-1819, around the time of his brother's death from TB, and some of Keats' greatest poems. Laudanum, opium, heroin - take your pick, these and other drugs have been used by people for centuries; some of the people who used them were artists, even geniuses; most were not, some monumental bores. As someone noted years ago in the cult film Liquid Sky, David Bowie was Bowie before the drugs. I expect without Keats' poetic skills, insights and brilliance, the drugs wouldn't have worked. New worlds swim into view on peaks without unnatural highs. Peeking into Chapman will do.
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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