Making Nothing Happen

W. H. Auden famously asserted that "poetry makes nothing happen” in his 1939 elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.”   

By writing that, Auden rejected the idea that poetry serves as a direct tool for political or practical change. Its value does not lie in changing the physical world, but in surviving as a voice for the human experience.

That sounds cynical, but it reflects his view of what art can—and cannot—do. He wrote it on the brink of World War II. He was confronting the limitations of literature in an era of rising Fascism and geopolitical chaos. Some reading this post may feel the same way about poetry in our current state of the world.

Why Yeats? Despite Yeats's lifelong political involvement and nationalist verse, Auden reflects that  "Ireland has her madness and her weather still." The poems did not change things. A poem cannot alter historical events, stop a war, pass laws, or feed the hungry. 

But Auden wasn't declaring poetry useless. Take that stanza further:

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,

Literary critics also point to a subtle grammatical paradox: poetry makes nothing happen. That is, art takes the invisible, intangible aspects of human existence—grief, silence, absence, or "nothing"—and transforms them into something tangible through language. And it survives.

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Frost and Auden on Artificial Intelligence

Before you start typing a comment here about how Robert Frost and W.H. Auden had no knowledge of artificial intelligence, let me explain where I'm going here.

I often use AI to create images to illustrate my (too) many blog posts. I was creating an image of myself surrounded by poetry based on what a chatbot already knew about me from prior queries. (You can see the result here.)

I can imagine many classic and modern poets sitting at a computer. The computer, the Internet, and certainly AI would be something from science fiction or fantasy, but being inquisitive people, I have to imagine they would want to experiment. They would certainly have opinions about all of it. So I proposed a kind of thought experiment to several chatbots about poets and AI, and specifically these two poets.

Robert Frost and W. H. Auden likely would have responded to AI very differently in tone, but with overlapping concerns about language, humanity, and authenticity.

Frost would be suspicious of abstraction and more interested in the human voice. I think he distrusted systems that moved people away from lived experience and direct human encounter. He valued some ambiguity and the “sound of sense” in language.

Though he might have admired AI’s technical cleverness, he would reject poetry produced without genuine experience behind it. Frost often emphasized that poetry comes from:

AI suggests to me that Frost might have asked, "Can language still be poetry if nobody has lived it?"

Auden might be intellectually fascinated by AI but morally cautious. He was interested in psychology, science, systems of thought, and modernity’s strange transformations and how language shapes society and consciousness.

But Auden worried about propaganda, impersonality, bureaucratic thinking, and probably would not be a supporter of any misuse of technology. Perhaps, he would see AI as an extraordinary linguistic tool, and also a dangerous amplifier of mass conformity or emotional detachment.

Auden wrote, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” but he did not mean that poetry is powerless. He meant poetry changes inner life indirectly, through consciousness and moral perception. He likely would have questioned whether AI can truly participate in moral experience or only imitate its language.

If the two sat down for a conversation and played with AI together, they might have some common ground. They would probably resist the idea that intelligence is merely information processing. Human meaning comes from mortality and embodiment, and art emerges from uncertainty and lived contradiction. The language of poetry matters because people risk themselves in it.

Like many people today, they might warn that AI could encourage people to substitute fluent expression for genuine thought.

They just might concede that much human language is already formulaic, imitative, and patterned. But poetry, for them, was valuable precisely because it resisted that drift into automatic speech.

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Prompt: Paradox and Negation

Magritte's negative tells us that this is not a pipe. It's a painting.

A paradox is a statement that seems self-contradictory or absurd but reveals a deeper truth. If a poet says, "The child becomes a man," it’s clear, but it’s flat. Using a paradox forces the reader's brain to stall and then restart, which makes the meaning stick. "The child is father of the man," wrote Wordsworth. You stop. You realize this isn't about biology. It's about how our childhood experiences form our adult selves.

If we want to get fancy about it, paradox creates "cognitive dissonance," which is the mental discomfort you feel when you hold two conflicting beliefs, values, behaviors, or ideas at the same time. That tension can push people to change their thinking or justify their actions so things feel consistent again.

Emily Dickinson begins a poem by saying, "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died ."  She takes on the paradox of a living perspective on death.

She begins another poem:

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality.

There is a paradox and a negation there. In a third poem, she begins with the negative: 

 

It was not Death, for I stood up,

And all the Dead, lie down -

It was not Night, for all the Bells

Put out their Tongues, for Noon.

It was not Frost, for on my Flesh

I felt Siroccos - crawl -

Nor Fire - for just my marble feet

Could keep a Chancel, cool -

Continue reading that poem, and see how she continues with what things are not. Using negatives (no, not, never, un-, without) is a technique often called apophasis, paralepsis, or via negativa. It’s the art of defining something by what it isn't.

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot contains the line "I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be," which highlights a paradox about identity and purpose, contrasting the speaker's ordinary existence with the grandeur associated with Shakespeare's character. 

Dylan Thomas puts the negation right in the title for "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night."

In W.H. Auden’s "Funeral Blues," he writes: "The stars are not wanted now: put out every one." By "un-making" the world, he shows the vacuum left by grief. Focusing on what is missing makes the "hole" feel more tangible. 

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

The poem begins with a series of imperative commands: "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking..." These initial lines suggest a desire to halt the world, to suspend reality in the face of immense loss.

For our March 2026 issue, we are asking for poems that begin in the first line with a paradox or negation (or both) and continue down that path. But note that in our full model poems by Dickinson and Auden, there is a shift in the second half that reveals that "deeper truth" beyond the negation and paradox. You should also attempt that poetic magic trick.

The submission deadline is, as always, the last day of the month - Tuesday, March 31.  

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Auden

"It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money
writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it." 
-  W.H. Auden

W.H. (Wystan Hugh) Auden was born in York, England, on February 21, 1907. As a young man, he was influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Old English verse. At Oxford, he formed lifelong friendships with two fellow writers, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood.

In 1928, Auden’s collection, Poems, was privately printed, but it was two years later when another collection (also titled Poems but with different poems) was published, that Auden was established as the leading voice of a new generation.

Auden is admired for his technical virtuosity and an ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form. He also included in his poems popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech.

The central focus of Auden's work switched from politics to religion when he moved to the United States in 1939. It was also in the U.S. that he met his lover Chester Kallman. While their sexual relationship only lasted two years, they remained friends and occasional housemates for the rest of their lives. 

The Shield of Achilles, which won the National Book Award in 1956, may well be W. H. Auden’s most important, intricately designed, and unified book of poetry.

In later years, Auden lived on a farm in Austria, teaching interstitially at Oxford and writing for The New Yorker and other magazines. He died in Vienna in 1973.

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well

That, for all they care, I can go to hell,

But on earth indifference is the least

We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn

With a passion for us we could not return?

If equal affection cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am

Of stars that do not give a damn,

I cannot, now I see them, say

I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky

And feel its total dark sublime,

Though this might take me a little time.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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The Fall of Icarus

The first time I saw the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus I thought "Where is Icarus?" 

The painting in oil on canvas is currently displayed in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels. It was long thought to be by the leading painter of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, Pieter Bruegel the Elder but that is controversial and it may be a copy of his original which is lost.  

I came to the painting via W. H. Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux-Arts", named after the museum in Brussels where he saw the painting. I later found a poem of the same name by William Carlos Williams, and just recently read "Lines on Bruegel's 'Icarus'" by Michael Hamburger. They are all examples of ekphrastic poetry. 

Williams' poem: 

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

insignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

His poem focuses on what is so interesting about the painting's title; that Icarus is insignificant on the canvas. He also tells you where to look for Icarus. His legs are sticking out of the water below the ship near shore.

W. H. Auden’s "Musée des Beaux Arts" goes in another direction. He opens by saying, "About suffering they were never wrong / The old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position. 

Auden wrote the poem in 1938, while he was staying in Brussels with his friend Christopher Isherwood. He was probably thinking of several paintings that are in that museum. In his first stanza, he is concerned with how the Masters displayed suffering. 

The second shorter stanza uses the Icarus painting as an example of:

how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; 

In this poem, the nature of suffering is that no matter how intense it is for the person undergoing it, most of the people around are ignorant or indifferent to what is happening. Accurate though that might be, it's pretty depressing.

Icarus comes to us in Greek mythology. He is the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, who created the labyrinth of Crete. Daedalus and his son are imprisoned in the labyrinth of his own creation with a dangerous minotaur. They attempt to escape using wings Daedalus had constructed from feathers and wax. 

The father warns the boy not to fly too low or too high. The sea's dampness will clog his wings and the sun's heat will melt them. But Icarus, probably thrilled with flight, ignores the warnings and does fly too close to the sun. The wax melts, the wings fall apart and he falls out of the sky and into the sea, and drowns. 

Ovid's treatment of the Icarus myth inspired many English writers (including Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, and Joyce. Other English-language poems referencing the Icarus myth are "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph" by Anne Sexton; "Icarus Again" by Alan Devenish; "Mrs. Icarus" by Carol Ann Duffy; "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert; "It Should Have Been Winter" by Nancy Chen Long; "Icarus Burning" and "Icarus Redux" by Hiromi Yoshida; and "Up like Icarus" by syllabic poet Mark Antony Owen.

 It is generally seen as a cautionary lesson about "high-flying ambition," and hubris.

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Writers as Diarists and the Diamonds of the Dustheap

Do you keep a diary or journal? Many writers do.

People seem to use the terms "diary" and journal" interchangeably, but I have always thought of them as different forms. I think of a diary as something done daily and more likely to record events of the day. I myself started writing one when I was in high school and I did try to write every day for awhile. Over the years (I have 12 bound blank-book volumes) it has become more periodic - weekly or even monthly summaries of what has happened in my life and thoughts about those events.

The Brain Pickings blog posted recently about famous writers on keeping a diary and it got me thinking about this practice which I have done for almost fifty years.

Sylvia Plath started writing in a diary at age eleven. Her ten volumes were posthumously edited and published as The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath and she saw her diary as a tool to “warm up” her formal writing.

“You want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you,” Madeleine L’Engle counseled in her advice to aspiring writers.

W.H. Auden once described his journal as “a discipline for [his] laziness and lack of observation.”

Virginia Woolf says in A Writer’s Diary that the value of journaling is in granting us unfiltered access to the rough gems of our own minds, ordinarily dismissed by the self-censorship of “formal” writing. Although she thinks that "The habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles." I appreciate that she also notes that "this diary writing does not count as writing, since I have just re-read my year’s diary and am much struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles."

I think that some writers take their diary too seriously. The want it to sound polished, as if it will be read by their biographers one day. Reading my journals from high school, I was definitely writing with the idea of a future reader - a wife, my children? I included explanations for things that I didn't need explanations of (though those may come in handy in old age!).

The journals written after I had children became much more personal. they would probably read to others as being written in a a kind of code in parts. No explanations.

Should it be written quickly and without the self-censorship of overthinking? Woolf would probably not like my slower journaling. She says that "if it were not written rather faster than the fastest type-writing, if I stopped and took thought, it would never be written at all; and the advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are the diamonds of the dustheap."

I do scribble the thoughts quickly (and my handwriting suffers). I don't revise. I never use material from my journals for poems or other more formal writing.

Poetry Makes Nothing Happen: Poems of Protest

I'm still thinking about the issues addressed in my last post and it had me thinking about a line from a W.H. Auden poem that is frequently quoted out of context. It's the line, "Poetry makes nothing happen."

It's often taken to be a negative comment on the effect, or lack thereof, of poetry on the world. Does poetry matter? Knowing Auden, you would have to wonder if that's what he really meant.

Another case like that would be these three lines from William Butler Yeats:

I think it better that in times like these
A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right.

Actually, both poets had a political side. W.H. Auden went to Spain and supported the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, and Yeats supported Ireland in the uprising against British colonial power. He even served as a Senator for the newly-formed Republic of Ireland.

Here's that line from Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" with a bit more context:

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.

Just three days after Auden arrived in New York in early 1939, news came that W. B. Yeats had died. Yeats was 73; Auden was 31. He quickly wrote "In Memory of W. B. Yeats."

It's not a protest poem in the traditional sense at all. So why is it in his post?

Read the complete poem "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" and you'll see that it has two ideas in it. It starts with unrhymed verse paragraphs that suggest that poets can't do much more than create a way of being remembered. The second section is in stricter form and argues that poetry is more powerful than time or death. There's an unresolved feeling to the poem as to which is true. Perhaps, Auden wasn't completely sure. I'm not sure myself.

Our April prompt is poems of protest. They might be poems against the war or following a prompt from ProtestPoems.org or in protest of what is happening in Tibet or Darfur or any number of world situations. But Poets Online is not a political website. So, your submissions can also be poems of protest against more abstract or personal concerns.

If you feel the need for writing prompts with more meaning, sign up for monthly poetry prompts at ProtestPoems.org and visit the Poets Against the War site. Post a comment below and let us know about other sites that encourage action-poetry.

Back in February 2003, First Lady Laura Bush canceled her symposium on "Poetry and the American Voice" because she learned that some of the poets on her guest list refused to attend in protest against the impending war. A spokesperson for her said that t it would be "inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum." As a reaction to that non-event, the Poets Against the War movement was born. Since then, the group's volunteer editors has reviewed more than 22,000 poems.

And just last month, we crossed the 5 year mark for the war in Iraq. Since 2002, at least 775 men have been held in the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A poetry collection was published in August 2007 that gives voice to the men held at Guantánamo. Poems from Guantánamo has poems by 17 detainees, most of whom are still being held there. The poems may not be poetry of the highest quality, but they are a powerful use of poetry, and they make something happen.


Further Reading
There's an extended discussion online about this in "Conversing With the World: The Poet in Society" by Rachel Galvin.