The Politic Poet
Poets come, roughly speaking, in either of two forms: the disorderly and the orderly. One should not be misled by the general publicity advantage of the former. For every Dylan Thomas who blows his top there is a T. S. Eliot who does not. Diplomacy, than which nothing could be more orderly (if only the same thing could always be said of its results!), is a great forcing-ground. The diplomatist-poet's name is legion. Paul Claudel can stand for the past. In London at present we have among others George Seferis, the Greek Ambassador, and Valentin Iremonger, a counsellor at the Irish Embassy. If Hossein Ghods Nakhai had not been recalled to Teheran a year or so ago to become Foreign Minister (he soon afterwards went to Washing- ton as Ambassador), we could have added him to our local tally. He is shortly bringing out here a collection of rubaiyat which he has chosen to compose not in his native Persian but in English. Thus he pays the greatest tribute pos- sible to Edward Fitzgerald, whose still ubiquitous version of Omar Khayyam's quatrains has often enough been lambasted by puritanical orien- talists.
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