Tag: auden
-
Are we being educated here?
In one of the lectures he gave while Oxford Professor of Poetry – on ‘clarity and obscurity’ – the now Poet Laureate Simon Armitage recalled attending a poetry reading with a non-poet friend (all the lectures are available to listen to here). After the reading, the friend asks Armitage about the mini-introductions the readers had…
-
Making Nothing Happen
It was probably inevitable that the two most famous quotes about poetry’s purpose, Shelley’s ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ and W. H. Auden’s ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ would be so contradictory: poetry is a house with many rooms. David O’Hanlon-Alexandra’s ‘New Defences of Poetry’ project, now available on its own website here,…
Jeremy Wikeley 