Is Poetry Useful?

W.H. Auden once famously wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen". This quote is taken from his elegy to Yeats where it is often forgotten that Auden then goes on to say that poetry is "a way of happening".

But if we did take Auden's quote out of context, what does poetry do? What is it useful for?

Questions like these assume that poems are required to have some kind of function to be considered useful.

But what real function does opera have? Or music? Or the visual arts? How about the arts in general?

Works of art can be moral, political, and didactic, but by no means do they have to be any of those things.

I mean, what is the use of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa? Or Picasso's Les Demoiselle's d'Avignon?

Poetry, my friends, is an art and art - great art - never needs to be explained.

From The Guardian:

George Szirtes gave this a sharper focus in his 2005 TS Eliot lecture, Thin Ice and the Midnight Skaters. Previewing his lecture in the Guardian, he wrote:

"'If poetry makes nothing happen what use is it?' scoffed a recent letter in a serious newspaper. It is not a new question, if a bit Gradgrindish in nature. What does music make happen? Or visual art? The writer might have been thinking of social change."

Listing various poems which had worked towards such change, Szirtes continued: "The subject of poetry being life, and politics being a part of life, poets have written as they thought or might have voted. Whether they actually made anything happen is not clear. The quotation about poetry making nothing happen is, in fact, half-remembered from the second part of Auden's In Memory of WB Yeats, that goes:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper; it flows south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

"Those who want poetry to make things happen forget the last line of the above: that poetry is itself a way of happening. But what does it mean to be 'a way of happening'? Does it mean anything at all?"

More here.