The “sense” of the poetry may be oblique to “rhyme schemes and metrical patterns that,” Brown says, “can never adequately be rendered in English.” Well, it depends on how pedantic you want to be about adequacy; some of Roy Campbell’s mid-century rhymed translations remain better poetry in English than any other versions of Baudelaire I know. There’s something else to poetry beyond its sense on the one hand and the poet’s specific formal choices on the other—not just a rhyme scheme, for instance, but the decision to rhyme these particular words: let’s call it the poem’s unheard melody.
It is not hard to see why the administration is happy to have its taste criticized. There is an elitist logic implicit in every haughty condemnation of kitsch, and progressives who call out MAGA for its vulgar aesthetics inevitably play into the motivating emotion of populism: the sense that elites look down on your way of life, your habits, your morals and, yes, your taste.
We continued to litigate strategies for evaluating AI, never answering the question: If we have never designed a test for the human mind that captures what it aspires to, why do we believe we can meaningfully measure AI systems, which are far more alien?
“There are all sorts of ways in which my own ability to take pleasure from thought was developed and changed, and not just given space, by the infrastructure and discipline of the university, and especially the intellectual standards it introduced me to. That seems like a type of nurturing authority that’s worth defending.”
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