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?
One of America's greatest prose writers of the last half-century has died, by his own hand - David Foster Wallace: novelist, essayist, and infinitely talented wordplayer; genius might be a word to use in relation to his work. He was also, by all accounts, a gifted and caring creative writing teacher (no mean feat). It is a tragic truth of writing that one never really realises the pain and sorrow behind the exuberant verbal masks that writers put on, and publish. Writers are so very vulnerable, even the best, and most beloved. Readers, take care of them. Fellow writers, be more gentle, too.
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