Other Voices

By Paul Gray

In his elegy on the death of Yeats, W.H. Auden wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen" and added, "It survives,/ A way of happening, a mouth." This sentiment seems a long step down from Shelley's 19th century claim that poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." But both statements add up to the same thing: the practical life of getting and spending needs, however grudgingly, the exhilaration and consolation of poetry, of memorable speech, of words striving to be true to themselves. The 20th century perfected the hard sells of propaganda and advertising, but talented people still worked to keep their language pure. They made nothing happen except the enrichment of their readers' lives. --By Paul Gray

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865-1939) He was temperamentally a Romantic, eager for seclusion: "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree." But public life would not let him. Whatever his subject--his native Ireland's struggles for independence, the growing chaos across Europe--he turned current events into lasting art. In the aftermath of World War I, he pronounced a memorable verdict: "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."

ROBERT FROST (1874-1963) His invitation to read at John F. Kennedy's 1961 Inauguration only confirmed his status as the nation's most widely recognized poet. That popularity stemmed largely from his readability; his poetry seemed to speak plainly, in rhyme. But his surfaces concealed depths. The line "And miles to go before I sleep" at first seems straightforward. Repeated immediately, the words convey a trip toward death.

W.H. AUDEN (1907-1973) The most technically adroit poet of his era, he dazzled readers when his works first appeared in the late 1920s. He struck a distinctive postwar note. His landscapes bristled with rusting machinery and ominous border crossings. He could be chatty: "Let me tell you a little story." He shied away from definitive statements, hedging even his love poems with limiting adjectives: "Lay your sleeping head, my love,/ Human on my faithless arm."

SYLVIA PLATH (1932-1963) The searing poems she wrote just before her suicide in 1963 made her a literary and feminist martyr. Her onetime mentor Robert Lowell described her last works as "playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder." Plath's poem to her long-dead father redefined confessional writing: "Every woman adores a Fascist,/ The boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you."

ALLEN GINSBERG (1927-1997) He emerged during the somnolent American 1950s as a bardic reincarnation of Walt Whitman. His incantatory, long-lined verses were styled not for parlor reading or classroom study but for public performances, featuring himself. He provided the music for the Beat Generation and a vision of modern malaise: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness."