After some reflection, I think listing "100 living poets" as the best is currently unhelpful. There are arguably more than one hundred British poets, born since 1993 (as a benchmark), worth reading, and being concerned about. However, Eyewear stands by its original list, such as it was shaping up to be, and will begin converting these over to the new label: THE EYEWEAR CANON. The Eyewear Canon will be a celebration of the very best living contemporary poets resident in Great Britain, as of 2013.
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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