For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper

These lines come from W. H. Auden’s elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” written in early 1939 just after Yeats’s death (January 1939) and on the eve of World War II. Auden, then newly emigrated from Britain to the United States, was reflecting on what poetry can and cannot do in a time of political crisis, propaganda, and mass violence. The poem contrasts the public world of power—statesmen, “executives,” and historical events—with the private, enduring life of language. The quoted passage appears in the poem’s second section, where Auden famously insists on poetry’s limited direct efficacy while affirming its survival and influence through speech and memory.

Auden’s claim that “poetry makes nothing happen” is deliberately paradoxical. He denies that poems directly change policy, stop wars, or compel rulers; the realm of “executives” is largely indifferent to lyric truth. Yet poetry “survives” in “the valley of its saying”: its power lies in language’s afterlife—how words persist, are repeated, and reshape inner life and moral imagination over time. The phrase suggests a sheltered terrain where meaning endures beyond immediate utility. Auden thus reframes poetic agency as indirect and long-term: not command over events, but the capacity to preserve feeling, clarify experience, and keep humane speech alive when public discourse is corrupted or coercive.

1) “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making …”
2) “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its saying where executives / Would never want to tamper.”