Making Something Happen

“Poetry makes nothing happen,” wrote W. H. Auden in 1939, expressing a belief that came to dominate American literary institutions in the late 1940s — the idea that good poetry cannot, and should not, be politically engaged. By contrast, Michael Thurston here looks back to the 1920s and 1930s to a generation of poets who wrote with the precise hope and the deep conviction that they would move thei...