Why poetry matters

an article by Rowan Williams published in the New Statesman

The story of 20th-century poetry teaches us that language is not a luxury: we need the right words in order to survive.



The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century
John Burnside
Profile, 496pp, £25

This wonderful book might be read as a long meditation on WH Auden’s notorious throwaway comment in his elegy for WB Yeats: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” John Burnside’s first chapter engages directly with this maxim, patiently showing us what it does and does not mean in its context. Auden is not shrugging his shoulders and accepting a place for poetry at the neglected margins of social life. Rather he is making a stark distinction between the ways in which human beings try to “make things happen” – the feverish efforts at political and technological control – and the tough imperative to find ways of echoing “the music of what is” in word and gesture.

The language that “makes things happen” in this context is the language of the Twitter feed, the advertising pitch, the chanted slogan at the rally or party conference (more and more indistinguishable from the advertising and entertainment world), the oafish put-down in parliamentary “debate”, the incomprehensible burble of policy documents and “values statements”.

Continue reading please. This piece brought me out of the mindless turmoil of politics and into a place of peace for the time I was reading it.

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