What did Auden say about poetry?

It is here that Auden makes his famous statement that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. This is often analysed as an admission of poetry’s limitations as a tool for social and political change (indeed, Auden once said in an interview that his poetry didn’t help to change the fate of a single Jew in the Second World War).

What does WH Auden say about love?

O tell me the truth about love. When it comes, will it come without warning, Just as I’m picking my nose? Will it knock on my door in the morning, Or tread in the bus on my toes? Will it come like a change in the weather?

Why did WH Auden write the poem Funeral Blues?

The poem was five stanzas long when it first appeared in the 1936 verse play The Ascent of F6, written by Auden and Christopher Isherwood. It was written as a satiric poem of mourning for a political leader. In the play, the poem was put to music by the composer Benjamin Britten and read as a blues work.

Why did Auden say poetry makes nothing happen?

“Poetry makes nothing happen” is therefore as much a rhetorical act as a statement of Auden’s actual beliefs about the efficacy of poetry. It means, essentially, Don’t corrupt poetry by making it do the wrong thing.

Is a way of happening a mouth?

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.

When was O tell me the truth about love written?

1930s
The poem, written by W. H. Auden at the beginning of the 1930s, is in fact pervaded by an intrinsic musicality, a stylistic feature which allows us to classify it as a love poem with elements that recall the genre of ballads.

Does poetry make nothing happen?

W. H. Auden, famously, said, “poetry makes nothing happen.” And yet he wrote those words in a poem, one that honors fellow poet W. B. Yeats. He goes on to say of poetry: “it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.” Few would say that the value of poetry inheres in making something happen in the world.