war, politics, and disappearing poetry gnomic utterance with a comparably complex critical reception—emanated from
aGrecian urn with the distinctive power to ‘tease us out of thought’.^9
Let us try putting it another way. In November 2004, giving his inaugural
lecture as Professor of Poetry at theUniversity of Oxford, the distinguished critic
Christopher Ricks chose the occasion to mount a defence of prose, his implied
point being that such a defence in such a context was precisely not impertinent.^10
Ricks is right to resist and to disprove by example any general declaration for the
superiority of poetry over prose. He knows, too, that there is a third term at the
party, ‘verse’ (‘This may be verse but it isn’t poetry’), and that ‘poetry’ as a term of
value may be unhitched from the requirements of verse or even of observing line
endings and stretched to encompass prose—or even stranger things, as was the case
with Wilfred Owen’s pity, which we shall recall below. But might we for a moment
entertain an inverted heresy—that onsomeoccasions and insomerespects poetry
may be inferior to prose? That poetic licence can license tendentiousness, sleight of
hand, the evading of the requirements of coherent, consecutive, and argued prose?
The question of poetry’s relation to historical and political events is always with us,
but it becomes especially acute when history and politics arein extremis—in times
of war, for example. The value of some such poetry for readers—its power to move
us and impress itself on our memories—might lie less in the truths it articulates
than in the extremity of the situation from which it is in flight, an extremity implied
in its evasiveness and opacity, its fugitive sense. As William Empson, another poet
writing in the 1930s, has it, ‘The safety valve alone||Knows the worst truth about
the engine.’^11
It is evident that returning Auden’s ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ to its
immediate context does not make it any clearer. The phrase comes in ‘In Memory
of W. B. Yeats’,^12 a poem which elegizes one of the twentieth century’s most
important poets. Auden’s elegy also marks the end of the 1930s, the decade of ‘the
Auden Generation’, in Auden’s own words ‘a low dishonest decade’,^13 and a decade
which had seen most hope that art might prove politically efficacious. Recording
the then present European nightmare in which ‘the living nations wait,|Each
sequestered in its hate’, Auden’s poem anticipates a dark future and stands on the
brink of the Second World War. Poetry’s escape clause occurs in the second of the
elegy’s three sections:
You were silly like us: your gift survived it all;
The parish of rich women, physical decay,(^9) John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, inThe Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1973), 345–6.
(^10) An edited extract from Professor Ricks’s lecture was published as ‘All praise to proper words’ in
theTimes Literary Supplement, 25 Feb. 2005, 13–15.
(^11) William Empson, ‘Your Teeth are Ivory Towers’, inThe Complete Poems of William Empson,ed.
John Haffenden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 67. 12
13 Auden, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, inEnglish Auden, 241–3.
Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’, ibid. 245.