Bookplanet: Some poetice words about poetry

From the good old Guardian:
The sweetest sound of all: With its simultaneous love and distrust of language, poetry illuminates life for us -- George Szirtes

"If poetry makes nothing happen what use is it?" scoffed a recent letter in a serious newspaper. It is not a new question, if a bit Gradgrindish in nature. What does music make happen? Or visual art? The writer might have been thinking of social change. There have been poems that worked towards such change. Pope and Swift wrote politically. Thomas Hood's The Song of the Shirt was about the exploitation of seamstresses. Shelley, who argued that poets were "the unacknowledged legislators of the world", addressed the subject of the Peterloo massacre in The Mask of Anarchy. The subject of poetry being life, and politics being a part of life, poets have written as they thought or might have voted. Whether they actually made anything happen is not clear.

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:

For poetry makes nothing happen: 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.

Those who want poetry to make things happen forget the last line of the above: that poetry is itself a way of happening. But what does it mean to be "a way of happening"? Does it mean anything at all?

The sweetest sound in all the world, said Finn MacCool of Irish legend, was the music of what happens. The music of what happens is the sensation of being alive to any event, from insects running about in a square of grass and the sun moving down a brick wall, to the power of a volcano, the fall of a temple or the death of a child. Or the deaths of thousands. The human mind encounters and accommodates all this.

But the encounter is inchoate until it enters language. Language looks solid, but is endlessly provisional, slippery, thin and treacherous. It shines and gathers light like ice, but is fragile and likely to melt, dropping us into the inchoate world of one damn thing after another. It orders as best it can. It names, combines, suggests and sparkles but is never to be entirely trusted.

Here are two propositions.

1. Poets are ordinary people with a special love and distrust of language.

2. Poetry is not a pretty way of saying something straight, but the straightest way of saying something complex.

It is in fact vital to love and distrust language. It is absolutely vital to tell truths that catch something of the complex polyphonic music of what happens. Someone has got to do it. It is poetry's unique task to say exactly what it means by singing it and dancing it, by carving some crystalline pattern on the thin, cold surface of language, thereby keeping language audible and usable. That is its straightness. That is its legislation.

Fribble! says the correspondent. What matters is the price of bread, the cost of shoes. Of course that matters. That, too, is life. And yet paradoxically, as it will seem to the correspondent, one major central European poet said in 1989: "When people have no shoes they want poetry; once they have shoes they need fewer poems."

Correspondents with several pairs of good shoes might raise their eyes at that, but bookshops all over now reasonably well-shod central Europe can bear witness to it. Not to mention those raw towns and ranches of isolation we all inhabit.