Does poetry make nothing happen?

Reflections and poems concerning some lines in W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”

Introduction: Questions, Questions, into the Infinite Aire

“Does poetry make nothing happen?” is admittedly an awkward sentence. One might say instead: Does poetry make something happen? Can poetry change the world? Can poetry improve the world? Must poetry improve the world? Many other questions are shaded by these shining questions. A few are: Are these the right questions? Should poetry try to make something happen? Should poetry try to change the world? Does political poetry endanger poetry? Does poetry have any obligations other than to be as good as possible? What are the consequences of reading fine as opposed to banal, trite, or doctrinaire poetry? What does reading bad poetry do to the mind, the spirit, our communities, and the world?

These questions are more easily posed than answered. It may be that rational answers are not answers at all, but try to catch the infinite with webs of words.

Yet these questions are interesting, as are the words we will be looking at from Auden. And rational discourse has its legitimate and important scope of activity. Let me begin with a poem of my own that engages these questions in its own poetic fashion. Then I will try to briefly examine a few of the many issues that arise in this fascinating, at least to me, and a few others, subject.

The Monument

(in honour of Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny)

You went by snow moaning in many voices.

Black fields of ice merged with starless nights

as griefs bore down like crosses of memory.

The road to Golgotha drones long and bleak.

There’s polar night, evening, then night again.

A prison from the good old gulag days.

With barbed teeth they screamed the biting air.

You died alone surrounded by the dark.

Yet, your monument is more lasting than bronze

and tinseled palaces topped with golden domes.

Neither army nor storms of men can crack

what you have built upon eternal rock.

Not all of you is dead, the immortal part lives

on, in your deeds, laughs, and in your refrain:

Be not afraid as I am not afraid.

The path you’ve made will never be overgrown

To those walking dead or smoking darkness

your laugh will mysteriously appear

like some pure breath of innocent air

from the commanding heights of Galilee.

after Horace’s “Exegi Monumentum”

This poem has a political element. Has it killed the poetry, or does the poetry survive? I leave this to the reader to reflect on, if any such reader turns up. I will return to one element of my poem below.

1. The Invasion of Ukraine, Speaking Grief

As I write these words, many Ukrainians are braving or dying winter days and nights of minus 20 C. inside their apartments and houses as the Putin-ordered Russian military has repeatedly bombed their electrical power grid for obvious reasons. Great evils continue here, and elsewhere. What is one to do? Four years ago, not long after Russia invaded Ukraine, some Canadian poets, including Penn Kemp and Susan McCaslin, horrified by the invasion but at a loss for what to do with their grief, began discussing W.H. Auden’s words from his elegy for W.B. Yeats: “poetry makes nothing happen...it survives / a way of happening, a mouth.” They wondered: how should, how can, poets respond to the word’s tragedies and cataclysms?

These reflections assumed a national character, as Penn Kemp, poet Richard-Yves Sitoski, and Susan McCaslin invited other Canadian poets to join the discussion. The result, thanks to the fortitude and effort of Penn Kemp, along with co-editor Richard-Yves Sitosky, was a published book of poetry: Poems in Response to Peril: An Anthology in Support of Ukraine.

I also contributed to this book with my poem, “13ish Ways Poetry Makes Something Happen,” engaging not only Auden’s question but also Wallace Stevens’ poem, “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” The tension between the focus on form in Haiku-like poems in Wallace and Auden’s always more engaged poetry is perhaps a necessary one in this discussion. I have pasted my poem later in this essay. But first, I take another look at Auden’s words.

2. Hitler’s Ashen Will, Yeats, and Auden’s Doubt

On January 28th, 1939, as Hitler’s will to war spread like ash over Europe, William Butler Yeats died. Shortly after his death, W.H. Auden wrote his “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” Below is the second of three stanzas:

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:

The parish of rich women, physical decay,

Yourself. 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.

Let me quote a slightly longer version of the quote we began with above. In this stanza, we note that before, and after Yeats, Ireland “has her madness and her weather still, / For poetry makes nothing happen: / It survives in the valley of its making...It survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.” One might say the same thing about the fate of Ukraine. Yet, for all that, each act does have its consequences, big or small.

It might seem on a first or second reading of the stanza, without any other context, that Auden is one of those people who think that poetry should mind its own business and stay out of politics, justice, and history. There are good poets who hold this view, but Auden is not one of them. His limitation for the nature of poetry, as a different mode of being from the practical world of power, was born of hard-won experience.

Auden was a leading poet of the English political left in the 1930’s. Like many engaged idealists on the Left, he went to fight in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side. Instead of driving an ambulance as he had intended, he was sent to the propaganda and press office. He left Spain soon after. Having seen the complexities of the civil war up close, his views by necessity became more complex. Idealism encountering experience rarely remains the pure and distant thing it once was.

Several months after Auden’s Yeats poem, from the United States, Auden wrote the raw yet erudite and in places formal poem "September 1st, 1939,” dated the day Nazi Germany attacked Poland. It begins:

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-Second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

of a low dishonest decade...

...Exiled Thucydides knew

All that a speech can say

About democracy,

And what dictators do,

the elderly rubbish they talk...

...The enlightenment driven away...

Later in the poem, he writes,

Faces along the bar

cling to their average day

Toward the end, he adds,

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie

And here is the entire last stanza:

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

This poem seems to interweave personal erotic pain and a larger pain at the state of the world, as World War II had just begun. One finds an often informal style, with lines that literate people today still remember: low dishonest decade, undo the folded lie, and a third even more famous line I note below. Later, Auden came to reject this poem. He particularly did not like the line – one I had not included above, “We must love one another or die,” likely because it was so direct. Yet by this time, the poem had become very popular, and it was published in The Oxford Book of American Poetry with the line.

Rejection or not, the careful reader will find Auden’s Defence of Poetry - the beating heart within - that survived all devastation: “All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie.” And, “Beleaguered by the same / Negation and despair, / Show an affirming flame.” This is as honest an account of what poetry can and cannot do that I have read. If I poet can manage these things, including the anguish, they will have done something important.

3. Poetry and Justice, a Vital but Dangerous Embrace

This, clearly, is a man who cared passionately about justice and other things. Did he care too much for the quality of his poetry as poetry? Probably such a question is unanswerable. He seems to have struggled with it as well. His poetry, at times, seems awkward to me, but at his best, with his knowledge, nuance in thought, and poetic form, his passion for justice does not destroy it the way it might for a lesser artist. Some poems by lesser writers are more successful as propaganda than as poetry. Such is not Auden’s fate, at least here. As to his other poems, I leave that subtle assessment to specialists. I am a general, passionate, concerned, often irritated, occasionally delighted, reader.

In his Eclogues, Virgil has a fine poem on the relationship between political power and poetry. I happened upon this link with Auden recently in the Gregson Davis Introduction to the Eclogues translated by Len Krisak. In the 9th Eclogue. Lycidas asks Moeris, who had had his farm confiscated, if the rumour is true that “the lands in question have been preserved through the power of song.” Moeris replies:

You did; that’s how the rumour ran. But, Lycidas,

In Mars’ weaponed world, our songs prevail the way

Chaonian doves do with the eagle in a fray.

One can, however, disagree with Auden notion that poetry survives only in the valley of its making, where executives would never want to tamper. Often, he is right, but not always. Certainly, in America, his adopted home, poetry was and is by no means central to culture. The idea that a poem might provoke trouble for the author in the United States or have any meaningful practical consequence would have been laughable except perhaps if she or he said something politically objectionable. A good poet, however, is usually sufficiently sly that the troglodytes can do nothing with his of her poems. They should be fine, unless a direct word should slip out on social media.

However, in other parts of the world, poetry might well be dangerous, and an act of courage, insanity, or both. For example, the high-level Stalinist apparatchiks in the Soviet Union did very much want to tamper with the poems of Osip Mandelstam, that most lyrical of poets. Not only did they want to tamper with the poems because they, among other things, didn’t fit the dogma that literature and poetry had to bow down to, but they also wanted to tamper with him, arresting and finally, effectively killing him when he died in a transit camp on the way to a gulag. He survived his first arrest, but not the second.

The death of Mandelstam is absurd, a tragedy. Yet, there is also a transcendent meaning: the spirit of freedom and art in his words made a powerful state afraid. Mandelstam himself recognized this supreme irony long before it befell him: In the Soviet Union, the power of poetry was affirmed: the authorities killed because of it.

Mandelstam’s plight shows us another danger for poetry arriving from the opposite direction. One hears the words “change the world” often these days. Very good, but from what to what? Because change, by definition, doesn’t only go toward the better, but also toward the worse. “Striving to better oft we mar what’s well.” Sure, but most things most of the time aren’t going very well. Yet, they could go so much worse. Hence, the conundrum, the agonized choice, with unknown consequences.

In bad times, doctrinaire ideas can invade the realm of poetry, casting out the true poets who refuse to blindly conform to any authority that they cannot accept with their conscience. And what’s worse, not only are the true poets cast out, but poetry itself. This is what happened to Mandelstam, and why he died. And it is why some die a spiritual death even today. As Orwell said in "Politics and the English Language,"

the English language “...becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

One might affirm a universal law: every good poem that is read to or by another improves the world, if only infinitesimally. The better the poem, the more who read it, the larger the consequence, if not originally in the nature of things, in the quality of the reply. And, if the quality of the reply becomes the nature of things, then the world has become better. The same is true, unfortunately, for the consequences of bad poetry written down or sung as popular lyrics.

Let me give an example of my argument for the power of consequences using my own poem, "The Monument," which is in dialogue with the fate of Navalny, Horace's “Exegi Monumentum,” and a similar poem by Pushkin. Firstly, we can see how diverse poems, in one case, by a poet who wrote more than 2000 years ago, written in Latin, and in the second case, a poet who was born more than 200 hundred years ago, who wrote in Russian, have both influenced not only me, but thousands of other people widely separated in time and place. And since both are fine poets, one cannot help but have their sense of craft and vision elevated and purified by reading them.

Secondly, we have my own poem. Here is my final stanza:

To those walking dead or smoking darkness

your laugh will mysteriously appear

like some pure breath of innocent air

from the commanding heights of Galilee.

Here, I refer to the power of Navalny’s acts and words on the future. But, for the few people who will read this poem of mine, they too will be influenced to reflect both on how I wrote this poem, and what I say here about those poor souls, spiritually defeated by circumstances, smoking darkness, or walking dead; How “the pure breath of innocent air” of Navalny’s sense of justice, a vision as true in him as it was in that carpenter from Galilee, who was so loved by his disciples that the believed he rose from the dead. Whatever one thinks of that, no doubt he had a vision of love and justice which must be seen as nothing less than divine, whatever the fate of the mortal man. And Navalny at the end of his life also lived that love and justice, suffered, and died for it. And my poem tried to put this into words.

4. A Free Gaze Across Boundaries – Goethe’s View of the Poet.

Before I leave this topic of the poet and meaning of her or his poetry, what it does, how it flows, and what it might mean, let me end with an Olympian vision. A long time ago, I read a very wise view on the role of the poet. On the last pages of Conversations with Goethe by Peter Eckermann, he quotes Goethe as follows,

“If a poet would work politically, he must give himself up to a party; and as soon as he does that, he is lost as a poet – he must bid farewell to his free spirit, his unbiased view, and draw over his ears the cap of bigotry and blind hatred...

The poet, as a man and as a citizen, will love his native land; but the native land of his poetic powers and his poetic action is the good, noble, and beautiful, which is confined to no particular province or country, and which he seizes upon and forms wherever he finds it. In this, he is like an eagle, which hovers with a free gaze over whole countries... If the poet has employed a life in battling with pernicious prejudices, in setting aside narrow views, in purifying the tastes, ennobling the feelings and thoughts of his countryman, what else could he have done?”

Some of this rings strangely in our ears, and yet, Goethe is not without wisdom. Few today would grandly declare his bold words, likely from his reading of the Ancient Greeks: the good, noble, and beautiful. And yet, many fine poets even today are trying, in their way, to engage these very qualities. And yet, in a world of injustice, how can we stay silent as the ash of evil spreads? Perhaps the question is: what is the best way to respond?

Below is my poem "13ish Ways Poetry Makes Something Happen." I am not entirely happy with it today, but it is a testament to that time. This is how I responded to the evil in Ukraine in the book, “Poems in Response to Peril: An Anthology in Support of Ukraine.”

I

The human voice speaks a world

to life. It says: this is what matters.

A poem is born in music even

when estranged from its natural home.

II

A poem calls, and answers, across

the divides of time, place, and creed.

Each line happens, then repeats,

with widening scope and sound.

III

Poems attend to nuance, sound,

and the musical geometries of form.

They revel and reveal, slipping the knots

of logic with metaphorical dance.

IV

The poet sees, feels, and names,

in all weather, adding gradations

of light or shadow, as required

by life or the pleasures of song.

V

Harder days bring deeper measures.

In bitter-times poetry is rarely

surprised, as poets are often

acquainted with the night.

VI

The poet is no saint. That’s

a different job description.

But many long for a higher

world and evoke it with words.

VII

When the bombing begins, those

who can’t stop it feel useless and

despair that they and poetry

cannot do more to save the world.

VIII

Poetry can’t fire a gun

or organize war strategy.

Nor are dictators and other killers

interested in speeches.

IX

But poetry has its ways and its

power. It is the naming art.

Anguish and grief lessen when

shared in the clear morning light.

X

Amid the fog of war, it tries

to resist the degradation

of language, to keep a space

open for the human

XI

With a ripped sleeve, broken stone,

or words of grace and pain,

poetry shows the pity

and the horror of war.

XII

Those who have survived hell attest:

sonnets can save the human spirit

even in concentration camps. The words

of poets ring out beyond the grave.

XIII

But war and power are not all,

not the best or most important part.

When one sees a blackbird or red

cardinal, they might see snowy

mountains, and think of many things.

Not a Conclusion...

On January 20th, 2025, I remember quite distinctly walking on Bathurst St. north of Bloor in Toronto, watching faces in the crowd going about their average day. Everything had changed, lightning had struck the broken ship of state, but the sound had not yet arrived. It would, in time. In the shocking early months of 2025, my neighbour, who’d moved from Chicago with his Canadian wife to Toronto, as this seemed a better place to raise a family, said,

“When we look back at it, we will see this as the good period.”

Questions of justice, which one defended from such a distance, may yet loom uncomfortably close to home. Thus, one must agree with Martin Luther King Jr. :

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

Letter from a Birmingham Jail, 1963

Robert Girvan, February 12th, 2026