*****
Ross Cogan studied philosophy, gaining a Ph.D. He has published three poetry collections, two with Oversteps, and Bragr (2018) with Seren. Ross received a Gregory Award in 1999, and has won the Exeter, Frogmore, Cannon Sonnet and Staple prizes, and come second in the Troubadour. His poetry has appeared in The Guardian, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, Poetry London, PN Review, New Welsh Review, Rialto, Stand and other magazines. Until 2019 he was Creative Director of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival.
*****
Poetry Makes Nothing Happen:
Reading Auden through the lens of Byung-Chul Han
‘Poetry makes nothing happen’. This brief, bleak, much-quoted statement is often read as Auden’s rueful acceptance of the impotence of poetry. Journalism can make things happen, perhaps also some academic work. But the idea of the ‘unacknowledged legislator’ is nothing but delusional self-aggrandisement.
And this is a plausible interpretation. As the poet and essayist Robert Huddleston has pointed out, Auden’s claim “was a necessary reproof to an ideologically mandated culture of protest that had a chokehold on the literary left in the 1930s”.[1] Though not a party member himself, the Auden of the 1930s was a fellow traveller, and wrote a number of poems that found favour in Marxist circles. These include the now notorious ‘Spain’, a “poetic hymn to the fight against Franco”,[2] with its talk of “the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder” juxtaposed with “the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting”.
Auden, of course, had gone to Spain intending to drive an ambulance, but instead had been put to work writing propaganda for the Republicans. He resigned after a week and, following a short visit to the front, returned to England. His entire stay had lasted seven weeks. George Orwell spent more than six months in Spain and was shot through the neck on the front line. The nationalist sniper concerned was only one of the people trying to kill him, and possibly not the deadliest. In July 1937 Orwell and his wife were charged before the Stalinist ‘Tribunal for Espionage and High Treason’ in Valencia with “rabid Trotskyism” and being agents of POUM, a Spanish communist group by then falsely accused of cooperating with fascists. They only narrowly escaped with their lives.
It was, then, perhaps inevitable that Orwell, while admiring his talent, would disapprove of Auden’s message. “Notice the phrase ‘necessary murder’,” he wrote in ‘Inside the Whale’, “It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word… Mr Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”[3]
At the same time, though, Auden was under fire from orthodox Marxists. As Huddleston points out, communists, like the American critic F.W. Dupee, were becoming disillusioned with what they saw as his waning commitment to the cause. “Look at the plaintive lyrics, the rueful public clowning, the growing tendency to challenge the pamphlet in the name of the poem, Marxism in the name of Love”, he wrote in the Partisan Review. Auden “lacks a critical intelligence,” is “the captive of his friends’ reformist gentility, their politically fostered blindness”; “the poet who began as the impersonal voice of a generation… seems, like Eliot before him, in his later work to have thrust deeper and deeper into his own ego.”[4]
So, the argument goes, attacked from all around, Auden sought to undermine his opponents’ arguments by denying the political significance of poetry. Dupee had missed the point – the aim of poetry was never to assist in the global struggle against capitalism, so it hardly mattered if he thrust deeper into his own ego; meanwhile Orwell – and perhaps Auden himself – could rest assured that no reader of ‘Spain’ would be led to go out and commit a murder, necessary or otherwise.
A way of happening, a mouth
And there is good evidence for this interpretation. It’s well known that Auden became sufficiently ashamed of ‘Spain’ to leave it out of his collected poems. Moreover, as Huddleston notes, in The Prolific and the Devourer – a long meditation on personal, political, moral and spiritual truth, begun in 1939 as he was turning his back on Marxism and towards Christianity, but never finished and not published until 1993 – Auden clearly expressed his “growing distaste for activist politics”. For example: “Tolstoy, who, knowing that art makes nothing happen, scrapped it, is more to be respected than the Marxist critic who finds ingenious reasons for admitting the great artists of the past to the State Pantheon.” He adds “If one reviews the political activity of the world’s intellectuals during the past eight years, if one counts up all the letters to the papers which they have signed, all the platforms on which they have spoken, all the congresses they have attended, one is compelled to admit that their combined effect… has been nil. As far as the course of political events is concerned they might just as well have done nothing.”[5]
But there is another, less negative interpretation. Actually, I believe that there are two alternative interpretations, and I shall come to my own favourite later. But, as Don Share, among other writers, has pointed out, the phrase “poetry makes nothing happen” appears in a poem, “one, moreover, that eulogizes a poet who made things happen (being a politician and activist, as well as a writer), WB Yeats.”[6] It appears in the short second section of ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ in which the dead poet is addressed directly. Poetry makes nothing happen, instead:
… 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.[7]
So, the suggestion is that Auden wanted not just to rebut the crude claim that poetry should exist to buttress an ideological agenda – to cheerlead for a political creed that will ‘make things happen’ – but also to replace this with a more positive view of its role. Poetry may not make things happen, but it survives, it endures. Beneath the notice of executives, who can’t turn a profit from it, it hangs on like scrubby plants in the cracks in the broken tarmac of raw towns the central planners have forgotten. And in so doing, it provides a mouth, a voice for all those who need it.
As the writer and academic Oliver Tearle puts it, “in saying ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, Auden is definitely not saying that poetry is therefore pointless or ineffectual… Rather than making things happen, poetry survives, and it is in this ability to transcend the generations – and the lifetime of the poet who creates it – that poetry has its power… it is itself a ‘way of happening’ (emphasis added), not something that makes history happen but part of history itself, perhaps, and part of life.”[8]
This, I imagine, is the consensus view. But I’m uncomfortable with it. I’m uncomfortable because it fits too neatly into our contemporary ‘art-as-therapy’ culture. We’re very familiar now with the idea that arts, activities in general, have value only in so far as they contribute to human wellbeing – so familiar, I’d suggest, that few of us ever question the assumption. Art has no ‘intrinsic’ value, of course, to us knowing, postmodern relativists, but it can at least make people happy. Like a pottery class, or for that matter an emotional support dog, it can help us to relieve our feelings, deal with our anxieties, and come to terms with our lives, to ‘find our voices’ and ‘express our truths’.
Vita contemplativa
The question at the back of my mind, though, is ‘why does this matter?’ Why is this a better, more sophisticated justification for the practice of poetry than making converts for the cause of revolution?[9] Do we, in fact, just assume it matters because the value of therapy and self-expression has been a dominant trope of western culture since at least the sixties?
My concerns have been given structure recently by reading the work of Byung-Chul Han. Byung-Chul Han is a South Korean born, German philosopher and social theorist who teaches in Berlin. He’s the author of numerous short works on different aspects of modern culture, some of which have recently been translated into English. Perhaps the best known is The Burnout Society.[10] This makes the case that, towards the end of the twentieth century, the ‘disciplinary society’ anatomised by Foucault evolved into the ‘achievement society’; the ‘society of should’ into the ‘society of can’. In our modern achievement society, the focus shifts from what we must do, to what we can be, if only we just ‘grind harder’, ‘live our lives to the max’ and ‘be our best selves’. That is to say, we internalise much of the infrastructure of repression and feel grateful for having done so – pushing ourselves harder and harder to attain economic goals and blaming ourselves when we remain poor and dissatisfied.
This is a great thing for capitalism, since a society of docile strivers is more productive than one of truculent serfs, and also requires less active repression – the state can save money on police and prisons and appear kinder and chummier as it does so.[11] However, it’s not so good for the rats taking part in the race – the psychological impacts of grind culture are depression and burnout. This is not so much because of the hard work – after all past generations have worked just as hard as us, perhaps harder – but through the harm we do to our personalities in transforming ourselves into willing cogs in the machine, always keen, always extrovert, always switched on. For Han, then, ‘burnout’ is a term of art – not just exhaustion, but the pathological consequences of voluntarily exploiting ourselves.
Han expands on this situation, and its cure, in what I consider his best book, Vita Contemplativa.[12] In the modern world, the modern west at least, “human existence is fully absorbed by activity, and therefore becomes exploitable,” and we are “losing a sense for the kind of inactivity that is not an incapacity, not a refusal, not just the absence of activity but a capacity in itself.”[13] Even leisure time, in these conditions, “remains tied to the logic of work”, becoming just another opportunity for activity or consumption: it “lacks both intensity of life and contemplation. It is a time that we kill so as not to get bored… We have forgotten that it is precisely inactivity, which does not produce anything, that represents an intense and radiant form of life.”[14]
For Han, modern western society imposes a “compulsion to be active,” an “acceleration of life,” which “turns out to be an efficient means of rule.”[15] It funnels us towards consumption, which isolates and separates people, or into frenetic activity and competitive performance. The response, though, is obvious: just stop. Or, if you can’t stop, build pauses into your life. At least, we might add, switch off your phone occasionally. This is harder than it sounds, but the rewards, he promises, are great. These may include better health and deeper happiness. More to the point, though, they could be the path to a more fulfilling, creative life:
“Those who are creatively active differ from those who are usefully active to the extent that their doing is for nothing. It is the proportion of inactivity in their activity that makes possible the emergence of something altogether different, something that has never been there before.
Only silence enables us to say something unheard of. The compulsion to communication, by contrast, leads to the reproduction of the same, to conformism.”[16]
Poetry is of considerable interest to Han, since it exemplifies many of these points in miniature. Everyday language – the language of politicians, businesspeople, journalists, even many novelists – “enters the mode of work. It withers and becomes a bearer of information, that is, merely a means of communication. Information is the active form of language. Poetry, by contrast, suspends language as information. In poetry, language enters the mode of contemplation. It becomes inactive.”[17] He adds that, as hardworking, active people, we don’t read poetry, and that this affects our relationship with language: “dazed by the rush of information and communication, we move away from poetry as the contemplation of language, and begin even to hate it.”[18]
Why is this a bad thing? Han’s answer is that “when language is nothing but work and the production of information, it loses its radiance. It becomes worn out, and keeps reproducing the same… Communicative noise destroys silence, robs language of its contemplative capacity. For this reason, language cannot reach new expressive possibilities.”[19] We could interpret this in an entirely practical, mechanistic way: humanity has built this wonderful device called language, but if we use it constantly for one sort of thing then we blunt its edge. Better allow space for a few poets to keep it fresh – and if you read an occasional poem yourself you might become better politicians, businesspeople and journalists.
This isn’t what Han is saying. Later in the book he states that “true language is not a means to an end, not a means of communication. It refers to itself and plays with itself. It speaks for the sake of speaking. In poetry it sheds all purpose. It does not work.”[20] I believe his claim is that too much communication is bad for language just as too much work is bad for people; that just as people need time to be inactive, to stare ahead and let their minds wander, language needs time to be poetic, to ‘contemplate itself’.
Making nothing happen
Your immediate response to this might – understandably – be that it’s nonsense. Language is a tool – a brilliant, sophisticated, multifaceted tool, certainly, but still just a creation of humanity, a made thing. It was made to assist us in communication and has been adapted by us in line with changes in society. It can no more play with itself or have its own purposes than a tractor or a washing machine. If that’s your view, though – and it would certainly once have been mine – ask yourself why you’re so sure you’re correct. Why shouldn’t something that’s evolved over thousands of years to a level of sophistication that few, if any, understand, and which influences, shapes and restrains our thinking in ways we really don’t comprehend, not have its own intrinsic value, independent of human concerns? That, after all, is a question many of us are currently asking about AI, a much more recent development. And if we accept that language has intrinsic value, it’s only a relatively short step to accepting that it might – in some sense – be said to have needs and purposes.
It’s instructive that Han locates this particular comment in a discussion of early Romantic attitudes to nature, since his concerns about people and language clearly parallel his concerns about the environment. Just as constant busyness is ruining our lives and constant communication ruining our languages, unrelenting human activity is destroying our world. And, notes Han, the solution to a crisis caused by human activity isn’t going to lie in more human activity: “if the cause of the impending disaster is the view that what is absolutely fundamental is human action – action that has ruthlessly appropriated and exploited nature – then we require a corrective to human action itself. We must therefore increase the proportion of action that is contemplative, that is, ensure that action is enriched by reflection.” For this we need “a radically transformed relationship to nature. The earth is not a ‘resource’ that we must now ‘preserve’.” Rather its value is integral to itself and shouldn’t depend on its usefulness to us or its role in our stories. It would, of course, be impossible for humanity to stop exploiting the earth, let alone to do so overnight. However, a first step towards respecting the intrinsic value of nature would involve doing less – simply sitting, watching it and surrounding ourselves with it, without any ulterior motive. In this sense, according to Han, “inactivity has political significance.”[21]
Vita Comtemplativa, then, is not Byung-Chul Han’s attempt to encourage us to do less, be mindful and ‘live more in the moment’, because it might lower our blood pressure and make us happier. It may well do so, but you can find thousands of self-help books and YouTubers who will tell you the same thing. Instead, it’s nothing less than an attempt to radically shift our understanding of our place in the modern world. That is, at a time when so many of us, having internalised the ideology of our own exploitation, are locked into a cycle of constant activity, it’s foolish to look for the answer to our problems in more activity. In these circumstances, inactivity becomes a radical act. It is related to the need to decentre humanity from the world, in order to recognise the intrinsic value of things like nature and language. Though constant inactivity is impossible, at least to the living, we need to learn once again to be still, silent, humble and, yes, bored. And we need to let an element of inactivity return to our relations with each other and the natural world. Above all, we need to recognise that inactivity has value – that sometimes – often – making nothing happen is a good thing.
And that’s where poetry comes in. When Auden wrote that poetry makes nothing happen, we shouldn’t read that simply as the negative claim that poetry cannot bring about political change. It can’t, of course, but that was never its aim. Nor, though, should we understand him to be saying that poetry has value in so far as it serves human therapeutic ends – for example, providing people with a voice and a means of self-expression.[22] Perhaps it can do this, though I suspect other therapies work better.
Instead, what poetry does supremely well is to introduce a pause in language. As Han says, it allows language the time and space to contemplate itself, to play, to do nothing.[23] This is valuable in itself. And in so doing it also points us towards more fruitful modes of being in the world. In short, poetry doesn’t make nothing happen. Poetry makes nothing happen. And that is the point.
[1] Huddleston [2015] ‘Poetry Makes Nothing Happen’, Boston Review, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/robert-huddleston-wh-auden-struggle-politics/
[2] Ibid.
[3] Orwell [1940] ‘Inside the Whale’, reprinted in An Age Like This, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters 1920-1940 (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968) p.516.
[4] Dupee [1938] ‘The English Literary Left’ Partisan Review vol.5, number 3, pp.17-18.
[5] See Huddleston, op cit.
[6] Share [2009] ‘Poetry makes nothing happen… or does it?’ Poetry Foundation, online, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2009/11/poetry-makes-nothing-happen-or-does-it
[7] Auden [1939] ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’, Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (Faber & Faber, London, 1966) pp.141-43.
[8] Tearle [2021] ‘The Meaning and Origin of “Poetry Makes Nothing Happen”,’ Interesting Literature, online, https://interestingliterature.com/2021/10/auden-poetry-makes-nothing-happen-meaning-analysis/
[9] Incidentally, I don’t mean to put this forward as a dichotomy, or to suggest that political poetry – by which I mean formally political, rather than ‘the personal is the political’ – has gone away. I have read plenty of politically engaged poetry recently, and I don’t doubt that its producers justify their activities much as FW Dupee did.
[10] Han, The Burnout Society (Stanford University Press, 2024).
[11] Of course, society also has to have just enough goodies to dish out to keep people striving. The risk is that, when these run out, the achievement society starts to lose its lustre. That might be happening now.
[12] Han, Vita Contemplativa, (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2024).
[13] Ibid, p.1.
[14] Ibid, p.2.
[15] Ibid, p.18.
[16] Ibid, pp.17-18. Italics Han’s.
[17] Ibid, p.19.
[18] Ibid, p.20.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid, p.93.
[21] Ibid, pp.40-41.
[22] I’m not claiming, by the way, that Auden didn’t mean this, or that he meant what I mean by ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. The game of guess the author’s real intentions yields pretty rapidly diminishing returns, after all. What I’m arguing is that this is how we, at our current moment in history, might best understand the phrase.
[23] As an aside, this is a neat defence of the value of the modernist project in poetry against critics who think that poetry should communicate something intelligible – a group I would once have numbered myself amongst. The claim, though, that language is there to communicate is ultimately one with the demand that people should be constantly active.
The High Window 