A Short Defense of Poetry by W. H. Auden

 

 

 

 

A Short Defense of Poetry

 

 

 

By W. H. Auden

 

 

The following address was given at a round-table conference on 'Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Literature' at the International PEN Conference in Budapest, in October 1967.

 

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Poetry is speech at its most personal, the most intimate of dialogues. A poem does not come to life until a reader makes his response to the words written by the poet.

 

 

Propaganda is a monologue which seeks not a response but an echo. To recognize this is not to condemn all propaganda as such. Propaganda is necessity of all human social life. But to fail to recognize the difference between poetry and propaganda does untold mischief to both: poetry lose its value and propaganda its effectiveness.

 

 

Whatever real social evil exists, poetry, or any of the arts for that matter, is useless as a weapon. Aside from direct political action, the only weapon is factual reportage—photographs, statistics, eyewitness reports.

 

 

The social conditions I know personally and within which I have to write are those of a technologically advance, urbanized, affluent society, whatever its political structure, which attains the same level of technological development, urbanization, and wealth, a poet will be faced with the same problems.

 

 

It is difficult to conceive of an affluent society which is not a society organized for consumption. The danger inherent in such a society is of failing to distinguish between those goods which, like food, can be consumed and forgotten or, like clothing and automobiles, discarded and replaced by newer goods, and spiritual goods like works of art which can only nourish if they are not consumed.

 

 

In an affluent society like the United States, his publisher’s royalty statements make it only too clear to a poet that poetry is not popular with the reading public. To any person who works in this medium, this should be, I believe, cause more for pride than for shame.

 

 

The reading public has learned how to consume even the greatest fiction as if it were a can of soup. It has learned to misuse even the greatest music as background noise to study or conversation. Business executives can buy great paintings and hang them on their walls as status trophies. Tourists can “do” the greatest architecture in an hour’s guided tour. But poetry, thank God, the public still finds indigestible; it still must either be “read,” that is to say, entered into by a personal encounter, or it must be left alone. However pitiful a handful his readers, a poet at least knows this much about them: they have a personal relation to his work. And this is more than any best-selling novelist dare claim.

 

 

 

 

 

W. H. Auden

 

 

 

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