I am tired of reading books about poetry that talk about how it changes lives, raises the hair on the back of the neck, cures cancer, and basically gives us healthier, more glowing skin. If poetry had one tenth of the impact on the common reader that it is claimed to, poetry would outsell pornography, video games, and alcohol. But it doesn't. Chess books and books on pottery sell better. Poems on the underground, and in the classroom, have not led to a massive eruption of poetically-improved humans. Indeed, the efficacy of poetry has long been a myth. Poems, except to poets, are a rather dull affair. They sit there on the page like a lump of cold meat. Poets love poems, because poets understand the vivacity of the processes that lead to a poem's making. But a poem on a page does not immediately jump up like a clever frog and dance with a top hat and cane. Poems are often remote, and indifferent, objects. Their technological prowess is equivalent to that of the gramophone. We have moved on. Perhaps. Or perhaps humans have fallen from a state where they can hear the music of the gods. I always thought that a poem was the best of civilisation - the best of music, word, thought, in one compressed space. And yet, who is moved these days by philosophy or theology either? Poetry is a great art, but poems are speaking, too often, in a dead language, to most people out there; we need to claim less for our poems, and slowly teach others to hear that they are.
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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