war, politics, and disappearing poetry Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposingwhat is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell.^16In the Auden passage there is a suggestion of a self-protective, self-inwoven
phrasing (‘it survives|In the valley of its [own] saying’), and a tendency to verbal
nouns—‘saying’, ‘happening’—which keeps the emphasis on poetry as process,
distracting our attention from the ends of poetry, from poetic consequences, from
the invisible events to which poetry might give rise. Auden tells us that ‘poetry
makes nothing happen’, that it ‘survives|In the valley of its saying’, that it is ‘a way
of happening’, that it is ‘a mouth’. How are we to put these varying characterizations
together? Are we dealing with an accumulation: ‘poetry makes nothing happen’
andit ‘survives|In the valley of its saying’and...? Or are we seeing a revisionary
process of thinking which discards thoughts as it goes along, a stripping of meaning,
or a case analogous to what deconstructionists call writing under erasure, where
words score a line through themselves even as they are written or spoken? Illogical
though it seems, the answer appears to lie somewhere between those two opposed
possibilities. We do not seem to be reading a stringent and searching process of
negation and rejection which pares itself down to settle on the smallness of those
two final syllables, ‘a mouth’. But nor do the lines add up into some large coherence:
in particular, ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ and ‘A way of happening’ seem, if
pressed, likely to issue in contradiction. Such coherence as there is seems to exist
at the level of figures rather than argument. Auden’s lines have what Stephen
Booth—arguing more generally for literature as ‘precious nonsense’—describes as
‘a feel of coherence...[an] ideationally insignificant coherence [which] often takes
the place of, does the job of, the ordinary, substantive, syntax-borne coherence that
we expect, demand, and do not notice is absent’.^17 This is the Auden, we remind
ourselves, whose long association with Christ Church, Oxford, was something he
had in common with Lewis Carroll, the Auden who had an enduring enthusiasm
for nonsense and light verse. Moreover, as the editor ofThe Chatto Book of
Nonsense Poetryreminds us, ‘nonsense may be a liberating way of dealing with the
intolerable.’^18
The promise of coherence which ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ makes its readers is a
limited one: the poem is divided into sections, and its publication history is of shape
shifting.^19 A variant of its first line excepted, the second section including ‘poetry
makes nothing happen’ did not appear in the first version of the elegy, published
(^16) William Shakespeare,Hamlet,iv. iv. 47–53.
(^17) Stephen Booth,Precious Nonsense: ‘The Gettysburg Address’, Ben Jonson’s Epitaphs on his Children,
and ‘Twelfth Night’(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 6–8.
(^18) Hugh Haughton, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry(London:
Chatto & Windus, 1988), 8. 19
For a brief account of the poem’s textual history, seeEnglish Auden, 426.