What did W. H. Auden mean when he said that poetry makes nothing happen?

He wasnt announcing in poetry, mind you—that poetry has no purpose and serves no function whatsoever. His memorial to William Butler Yeats, where this line is to be found, tells us a different story. Certainly, poetry doesn't make everything happen, but those things that can be said to be good—to be a part of that complex abstraction Plato and Aristotle called the highest good—involve poetry at its most fundamental level of meaning.

Perhaps Shelley said it best when he wrote in his Defence of Poetry that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. They speak truth to fact, or as Shelley put it simply, a poem is the image of life expressed in its eternal truth.

That somewhat paradoxical line of Auden's is a strategic call to the reader, a gauge thrown at his feet, and a challenge to find, recognize, and celebrate all the things that poetry is and what the poet does. No, we gently chide the poet, poetry makes so much happen.

And Mr. Auden, your poem—that's such a moving paean to the power of imagination wedded to words—poetry, you know—has the power to move our souls, to touch the deepest part of us. That, Mr. Auden, is something, something pretty amazing and well worth celebrating.