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quality, its apparent directness and absoluteness, the simplicity of its wording,
itsassurance of profundity and certainty. Yet it is a phrase which eludes our
attention, shifting sands already becoming apparent when we ask where we are to
put the emphasis. ‘Poetrymakes nothing happen?’ ‘Poetrymakesnothing happen?’
‘Poetry makesnothinghappen?’^3 The simplicity of the individual words also proves
elusive. ‘Nothing’ is especially problematic: at least since Shakespeare the word
has been something of a riddle. And the vagueness of ‘things’ is writ large in
English verse from Wordsworth’s ‘a sense sublime|Of something far more deeply
interfused’, his ‘All thinking things’, and his ‘rolls through all things’,^4 getting
vaguer and more negative, through Tennyson’s ‘something more,|Abringerof
new things’ and his ‘something ere the end’,^5 to Geoffrey Hill’s sinister ‘Things
marched...’ and ‘Things happen’.^6 The latter of Hill’s phrases also suggests that
‘happen’—one thinks too of ‘happenstance’, the colloquial ‘Stuff happens’ and
its vulgar variant, ‘Shit happens’—also writes vagueness into the phrase: ‘happen’
simply acknowledges that events have occurred but withholds explanation, not
least explanation in terms of causation. Already a disjunction is appearing in the
Auden phrase between its resonance and its meaning: it sounds good, but sense slips
between one’s fingers, leaving ‘memorable speech’^7 —Auden’s characterization of
poetry—but also memorable opacity. To borrow the words of another of Auden’s
speakers,‘Whatdoesitmean?Whatdoesitmean?Notwhatdoesitmeantothem,
there, then. What does it mean to us, here now? It’s a facer, isn’t it boys?’^8 Afacer?
Or a teaser? John Keats knew that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—a comparably
W. B. Yeats’, in Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (eds.),W. H. Auden: ‘The Language of
Learning and the Language of Love’, Uncollected Writing, New Interpretations,AudenStudies2(Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1994), 155–63; Peter McDonald,Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 189–216; Michael O’Neill,Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 263–65; and Rainer Emig,W. H. Auden: Towards a Postmodern
Poetics(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 107–9. Anthony Hecht expresses his frustration at the extensive
discussion: ‘And now comes a little phrase thathas raised as many hackles as nearly anything else
Auden ever wrote. An awful lot of foolish commentary has been devoted to, mainly attacking, Auden’s
claim that ‘‘poetry makes nothing happen’’ ’ (Hecht,The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W. H. Auden
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 144). Yet Hecht cannot resist joining in (see esp.
pp. 140–4 and 147–9), any more than the writer of the present essay: in the latter’s defence, however,
foolishness or nonsense forms a substantive part of the argument advanced here. The fullest treatment
of Auden’s four words, a whole book which grows from them, is undoubtedly Peter Robinson’sPoetry,
Poets, Readers: Making Things Happen(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).
(^3) This point has been made by George Myerson in conversation with the present writer and by
McDonald, 4 Mistaken Identities, 197.
William Wordsworth, ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, inWilliam Wordsworth,
ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 134.
(^5) Alfred Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’, inThe Poems of Tennyson,i,ed.ChristopherRicks,2ndedn.(London:
Longman, 1987), 617.
(^6) Geoffrey Hill, ‘September Song’ and ‘Ovid in the Third Reich’, inCollected Poems(Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 67 and 61. 7
Auden, ‘Introduction toThe Poet’s Tongue’, inEnglish Auden, 327.
(^8) Auden, ‘Address for a Prize-Day’, ibid. 61.