Description:
<jats:p>Auden’s famous complaint that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, and Blanchot’s that art is useless to the world and to itself, are often cited as a truth about the practical uselessness of creative practice. Blanchot’s is, of course, an insistence on the autonomy of art, while Auden’s is a line from a poem – it is his elegy for WB Yeats, written to mourn not only a dead poet, but also the loss of peace (written, as it was, in the shadow of World War 2). Yet each writer has chosen writing, and ‘artistic’ writing, to complain that art/writing has no capacity to influence society or effect change. This is a bleak view of poetry and what it might be able to contribute to social needs: to knowledge, to understanding, and to the possibility of engendering change. Though it is perhaps a reasonable perspective, given the fact that poetry is about the aesthetic rather than about social action, I still wish to interrogate this attitude, to explore the possibility that poetry can in fact make some things happen: and, in particular, that it can generate knowledge and therefore new ways of seeing and of doing.</jats:p>