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WAR, POLITICS,
AND
DISAPPEARING
POETRY: AUDEN,
YEATS, EMPSON
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W. H. Auden’s ‘poetry makes nothing happen’^1 is one of the most discussed and
interpreted phrases in twentieth-century poetry, the subject of discriminations
which are—depending on one’s point of view—ever more exacting or ever more
exquisite.^2 The phrase’s seductiveness for readers and critics lies in its gnomic
The author of this essay is gratefully indebted to Peter McDonald and to my colleague, George
Donaldson.
(^1) W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, inThe English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic
Writings 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977), 242.
(^2) A far from complete gathering of such critics includes Louis MacNeice,The Poetry of W. B.
Yeats(London: Faber, 1967), esp. 192; Samuel Hynes,The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in
England in the 1930s(London: Faber, 1976), 349–53; Lawrence Lipking,TheLifeofthePoet:Beginning
and Ending Poetic Careers(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 151–60; Edward Callan,
Auden: A Carnival of Intellect(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), esp. 146–53; Lucy McDiarmid,
Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot and Auden between the Wars(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984),passim;idem,Auden’s Apologies for Poetry(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990),passim;
Michael O’Neill and Gareth Reeves,Auden, MacNeice, Spender: The Thirties Poetry(Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1992), 159–61; Stan Smith, ‘Persuasions to Rejoice: Auden’s Oedipal Dialogues with