Something More About Nothing: Art and Poetry and Politics

W. H. Auden on St. Mark’s Place, New York

Midway through his elegy for W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden writes, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. / Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, / For poetry makes nothing happen.” Why would Auden say this? He wrote “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” in 1940, a year after Yeats died, having lived a long life as a poet and advocate for the Irish Free State. A member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Yeats did his share of propagandizing and of course he dedicated many poems to Ireland’s nationalist aspirations. Auden is willing to say—or to suppose—that Yeats’s politicking had some effect on Ireland’s fight for freedom, but not that his poetry did. “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Auden’s rueful axiom emerged from his career as a political poet.

During the 1930s, he belonged to the literary left. Never a member of the communist party, Auden nonetheless sympathized with its egalitarian ideals. Appalled by the rise of Spanish fascism, he joined the leftwing Republicans in their struggle against Franco. Throughout this interlude, he continued to write the poems that made him, in the words of the critic F. W. Dupee, “the impersonal voice of a generation.” A communist who opposed liberal democracy as fiercely as he opposed fascism, Dupee deployed his considerable authority in support of poems and novels that advanced Marxist doctrine. According to his version of political correctness, literature had no proper place for such bourgeois phenomena as displays of individual sensibility. When he noticed that Auden’s devotion to the cause was weakening, Dupee condemned him for sinking “deeper and deeper into his own ego.”

By the time he wrote his elegy to W. B. Yeats, Auden felt he had nowhere else to sink—or no other garden to cultivate. His experience in Spain and among left-leaning literati in the English-speaking world had convinced him that poetry has no political clout. Propaganda possibly and direct action sometimes, but never poetry. In 1939 he rejected in straightforward prose “the fallacious belief that art makes anything happen.” “The honest truth,” he added, “is that, if not a poem had ever been written, not a picture painted, not a bar of music composed, the history of man would be materially unchanged.” But is this true?

To answer this question, we must first spell out the difference between art and propaganda, which uses imagery in whatever medium to send an immediately graspable message. By contrast, a work of art is open, uncoercive, an invitation to make of it what we will. Some artworks are baffling, and none permits us to be completely certain of its meaning, unlike the paintings of happy tractor drivers churned out by the yard in the Soviet Union. Happy tractor drivers, happy mothers of large families, stern heroes with their gazes focused on the utopian horizon—imagery of this sort was so manipulative in such obvious ways that Soviet citizens learned to see it without registering it.

So propaganda does make something happen. It convinces its audience that the regime in power is duplicitous to its core—or it convinces most of the audience. No doubt some saw in the image of the happy tractor driver a believable promise that a worker’s paradise was just around the corner. That was just one of the laughable messages sent by Soviet propaganda. However, those sent by our moment’s propaganda are far from laughable. I am thinking of all the works on view in contemporary galleries that argue for the dignity and rights of minorities, that deplore police brutality and excesses of corporate power. No decent gallery-goer would disagree with these messages, yet it is fair to ask if their transmission has any effect beyond reminding us of beliefs we already hold. And what effect do works of art have?

Auden offered no evidence in support of his claim that art lacks the power to turn history in a beneficial direction. Nor has anyone ever shown that art does have that effect. We who care about art assume that it is good for us, for society, for the future of humankind, but we can’t prove it. These are matters of faith, which is not to say that discussion is pointless. Faith persists only if it has some foundation, however elusive it may be or insubstantial it seems when we look at it closely. My belief that works of art are good for us rests on the value I find in my experience of those works. This value is impossible to describe in any but the haziest terms, and yet I take it to be real and significant. It has to do not with the discovery of meaning in paintings and poems but with becoming aware of our part in creating that meaning. It has to do with a subtle sort of personal agency.

None of this puts me in opposition to the disillusioned, post-political Auden who said that “poetry makes nothing happen.” It doesn’t align me with him, either. Finally, the question of what poetry does or does not do is not of much use. The value of poems and paintings and other works of art is not to be found in patterns of cause and effect. Their value is in the opportunities they provide for us to respond to their openness and ambiguity, their disinclination to send a clear message. In responding we become, for a moment and sometimes permanently, more completely who we are. I believe but cannot prove that this process of becoming is a good thing, if not for history in all its grandeur, then for the flow of ordinary life.