Poetry makes everything happen

Art by Mark Davis

It’s not true that poetry makes nothing happen. Not even Auden believed that.

When W.H. Auden wrote those famous words in his elegy, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” he meant something very different than that truncated pull-quote suggests. We need to hear him out:

          Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still.,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

Poetry makes nothing happen, Auden says—instead, it is the means by which change occurs. In this same way, a highway doesn’t transport you, but try getting anywhere without it. It’s essential.

And poetry still has an effect—as do fiction, essays, raps, lyrics, chants, screams. We can be quiet as unacceptable actions happen around us, or we can use our voices. We can call out and fight the power. And we can be a voice for compassion and dignity, too.

In my lifetime, there has never been since an urgent need for it.