Writing during the Irish Troubles in her study Poetry in the Wars (Bloodaxe, 1986), Edna Longley observed that all Northern Irish poetry since 1969 had 'shared the same bunker': For war spares neither the poetry of Xanadu nor the poetry of pylons.' My friends had been writing for years about guns and frontiers and factories, about the 'facts' of psychology, politics, science, economics, but the fact of war made their writing seem as remote as the pleasure dome in Xanadu. 'If the war made nonsense of Yeats's poetry and of all works that are called 'escapist', it also made nonsense of poetry that professes to be 'realist'. In his book The Poetry of WB Yeats, written during the conflict and published in 1941, Louis MacNeice wrote: But what does it mean to be 'a way of happening'? Does it mean anything at all?'Īuden wrote his elegy after Yeats's death in January 1939, as the world was preparing itself for war. 'Those who want poetry to make things happen forget the last line of the above: that poetry is itself a way of happening. Raw towns that we believe and die in it survives, Would never want to tamper it flows southįrom ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, In the valley of its making where executives The quotation about poetry making nothing happen is, in fact, half-remembered from the second part of Auden's In Memory of WB Yeats, that goes:įor poetry makes nothing happen: it survives Whether they actually made anything happen is not clear. Listing various poems which had worked towards such change, Szirtes continued: 'The subject of poetry being life, and politics being a part of life, poets have written as they thought or might have voted. What does music make happen? Or visual art? The writer might have been thinking of social change.' It is not a new question, if a bit Gradgrindish in nature. ''If poetry makes nothing happen what use is it?' scoffed a recent letter in a serious newspaper. Previewing his lecture in the Guardian, he wrote: It is “Emptied of its poetry.” Negative words begin to make an appearance as well, like “hate,” “distress,” and “disgrace,” which could either be a manifestation of the speaker’s grief over the loss of Yeats, or it could be meant as uncontrollable or unintended, that with the loss of Yeats so were beauty and complexity lost.George Szirtes gave this a sharper focus in his 2005 TS Eliot lecture, Thin Ice and the Midnight Skaters. Perhaps this is an effect of Yeats’s death, that in his absence life, and poetry itself, becomes less poetic. The end rhymes, in this section, are in words that are often only one syllable, simplifying it.

Structurally, the third and final section differs from the first in that it consists of shorter lines and shorter stanzas. The fact that it is so short speaks to this as well the speaker needs to move quickly on to the third section, which contrasts sharply with the first section. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry,” and “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives” are halted by punctation, giving a sense that the speaker is in pain, unable to speak as rhythmically as was possible in the first section. The second section is the shortest and is also only composed of one stanza made up of ten lines. “The death of the poet was kept from his poems,” is a perfect example of this, the speaker is almost desperate to keep Yeats alive in some form. There is also a focus on the permanence of his poetry: “He is scattered among a hundred cities,” “To find his happiness in another kind of wood,” and “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.” It seems almost like a promise to Yeats, as though the speaker is swearing to keep the work of Yeats alive, like it makes the death of Yeats permissible.

I say most poetic because the long lines within each stanza create a long, slow rhythm, and because the words at the end of each line, the rhyming words, are composed of multiple syllables. The first is the longest and the most poetic, and represents the initial mourning. Yeats is divided into three sections, and each section represents a phase in the world after his death.

Scansion of poetry makes nothing happen