Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
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.

-W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”

I’ve been thinking a lot about poetry and politics.

This is one of those recurring themes in my thought life. I’m an idealist who masquerades as a realist, but I cannot shake the belief that good art can shake the system to the core.

On the other hand, I fancy myself an artist, or at least a fella who likes to play with language. And, as such, I have always harbored a deep respect for Oscar Wilde’s apology for the uselessness of art.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies.

I believe Oscar. Of course, loving beauty got him two years hard labor. Maybe he was more ethical than he thought. Maybe it was his ethics that ran him headlong into the authority of the day. And perhaps his art helped to (eventually? still going on?) bring down the ethics that put him in prison.

But poetry makes nothing happen.

Auden’s words about Yeats.

And here is Yeats, taking swipes at and then steps toward Irish Nationalism. He turns his Nobel acceptance into an opportunity to promote Ireland:

“I consider that this honor has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature, it is part of Europe’s welcome to the Free State.”

Ahhh, but the Yeats I love is the Yeats with “a faerie hand in hand,” the romantic Yeats. Or that dark lyrical pessimism of Adam’s Curse: “we’d grown as weary hearted as that hollow moon.” Gorgeous. The beauty that needs no moral.

Poetry makes nothing happen…

And maybe Auden’s point is that politics, the give and take, the back and forth, it goes on with our without our art. But it sure don’t hurt to try and make something happen. Maybe the attempt to make something beautiful, and in that way to make something happen, maybe this is a windmill worth chasing.