Eyewear has been watching developments closely in Crimea, and as we predicted in earlier posts, the Russians have taken a hard line, and today it is reported they have effectively taken control of Crimea with their troops. This is huge. This is war in Europe - Russia has invaded a sovereign nation. Consider Germany (in 2014) occupying a part of Austria - unthinkable. Uncivilised. Unwelcome. And, unlikely to be stopped. The West seems powerless to do more than threaten to cancel meetings (though Obama sounds tough). Ukraine may fight back. They have an army of one million reservists and a rusty but large air force, with a lot of their own tanks. If Crimea becomes a firefight, it will be all about containment - keeping the conflict local, if possible. We have begun a new cold war, as many papers report today - but if the Russia-Ukraine war spreads to the main part of Ukraine, then all bets are off, and NATO would be expected to threaten to intervene. Given one of these nations has atomic weapons, the whole scenario playing out at the moment is quite monstrous. I feel very sorry for the Sochi athletes and Olympic organisers - all that hard-won goodwill wasted in less than a fortnight. Russia has shown itself unwilling to join the West as an ally, but prefers to present itself as a solitary second world power, the pivot between the West and China, to establish a three-way split for world domination. This is a pity. They could have come in from the cold.
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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