Britons may be forgiven for waking up this morning thinking they are in a staging of Les Mis. For today the news is this: benefit cheats can be imprisoned for up to ten years. Now, I don't know about you, but that's the definition of draconian. It may be morally repugnant to cheat the state of some money, but very few crimes legitimately warrant doing serious time in the klink. Hard time is a serious thing to inflict on anyone - and it is likely to make a soft criminal a hardened one on release. Rather than impose longer sentences for victimless crimes (the state is not a person), the state should find alternatives to cells, bars and Wormwood.
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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