I met Seamus Heaney once - he was celebrating the tenth anniversary of his win of the Nobel prize - and I was part of the dinner party (a guest of Tamar Yoseloff). We spoke briefly, and he called me "Hot Toddy". I am very sad - even unexpectedly moved - to learn of his untimely death at the age of 74. Heaney was the greatest living traditional, lyric poet, since Philip Larkin. He was not as great as Yeats, or Kavanagh, but he was a poetic genius, and, what is more, he reached out to the common reader in a way that was astounding; his warmth was palpable - he cared about readers and people. I feel that his poetry will be judged to have shied away too much from the themes of love and bodily passion that made Yeats so universal - and his over reliance on the Classical tradition was perhaps old-fashioned - but in his best poems, no one could match his moral vision, his sonic intelligence, and his gravitas. He saw far and wide. I don't think he was a very witty poet, but he was a great poet. Now that he is gone, the English world has very few giants of lyric poetry left - perhaps only Walcott and Hill, and a few others. This is a sad day for poetry.
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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