I ended the first part of this piece by summarising my argument in terms of needing to better understand, and then to resist, the “Strict Father’ framing mentality in connection with silly generalisations that distort the complexities of necessary debate. I then suggested that engaging with poetry may be one way to help ourselves do that. Here I want to take up that notion.

Back in 1995 Simon Schama reminded his readers that: ‘to take the many and several ills of the environment seriously does not … require that we trade in our cultural legacy or its posterity’ (1995: p.18). Consequently I’ll start with a relevant aspect of that cultural legacy, the standard claim made against poetry by political activists: namely that it changes nothing. Those making this claim often support it by referencing the second section of W.H. Auden’s poem In Memory of W. B. Yeats (d. Jan. 1939),which includes the line: ‘… poetry makes nothing happen…’ (An argument that ignores what Auden wrote in the poem that follows it – In Memory of Ernst Toller (d. May 1939) – which is that: ‘We are lived by powers we pretend to understand’. But that, I think, is perhaps a separate issue).

In Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them (2016)Paula Meehan, a poet deeply concerned about both environmental and social issues, takes up what is said ‘about the failure of poets in the face of politics’. She argues that if, as Auden claims, ‘poetry makes nothing happen, maybe it stops something happening, stops time, takes our breath away…Maybe it’s like the negative space in a painting by which what is there is revealed, to be apprehended by human consciousness’ (p.19). I fear that increasing our capacity for wonder in the face of what is, however, is not going to cut much ice with those for whom only the actions about which they are passionate, only literally “making something happen”, counts as worthwhile.  

Another poet, John Burnside, who was also passionately concerned with environmental issues, takes up the question of Auden’s claim in rather more detail. In The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century (2021) he points out that those in the English-speaking world who are happiest with seeing poetry as ‘marginal and ineffective’ dismiss it on the basis of ‘a fundamental misunderstanding of how poetry actually works, both on the individual imagination and in the social sphere’ (pp. 18-19). Burnside pointing out just how naïve it is to think that a poem, or a whole life-time writing poetry, could ‘change the world’. Rather, he insists, what poetry actually ‘does, first, is to survive… actively, on its own terms’. It is, he goes on to claim, ‘a way of being, a provider of context, an independent, non-oppositional, entirely autonomous state’. However, by that he does not mean that it has no communal role. Rather he sees it as a discipline, for both writer and reader; one that heightens attention to the world. He goes on: ‘This act of paying due attention is in itself a political act, for it enhances both our appreciative and our critical abilities, which are key to defining a position in a societal sphere in which both these faculties are currently at risk’ (pp.23-25). It’s at this point that I think his argument both aligns with Rebecca Solnit’s musings on the Left’s reaction against aesthetics and throws light on what I suspect is Monbiot’s real motive for making his silly claim about poetry.

It’s also the case, as Burnside goes on to point out, that what he argues about poetry applies equally to the literature and the humanities as ways of resisting what Jonathan Franzen calls ‘cultural totalitarianism’. I would want to add the visual arts to his list, although it’s of course often difficult to maintain his argument in relation to the visual; arts in the face of their increasing commercialisation and trivialisation by the pressures exerted by the “culture industry” and its various State-funded instruments. An industry hell-bent on merging the more “popular” aspects of the arts with commercial entertainment, while maintaining the supposedly “high” or “difficult” arts as fodder for forms of conspicuous consumption and elite posturing (much like “high” fashion). A world documented, if one’s willing to do some reading between the lines, in a book like Sarah Thornton’s 33 Artists in 3 Acts (2014). But all this leads into another whole line of thought, one that I’m not comfortable tackling but that, if I can get through and digest Justin O’Connor’s Culture Is Not An Industry: reclaiming art and culture for the common good (2024), I may feel obliged to return to.