Winner of the 2026 Hubert Butler Essay Prize

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A Way of Happening, a Mouth: On the Survival of High Culture in Catastrophic Times

“La poesia non fa accadere nulla”  By Edoardo Coppi

When Auden wrote, in his elegy for Yeats, that "poetry makes nothing happen," he was not making a statement of despair so much as one of precise, almost legalistic clarification. The line arrives after the poem has already conceded that the dead poet's words will be "modified in the guts of the living," scattered among "the valleys of his saying" where "executives would never want to tamper."(1)  Poetry, Auden insists, does not intervene in the mechanisms of power. It does not stop tanks, repeal laws, or feed the starving. And yet the very poem making this claim immediately continues: poetry "survives, a way of happening, a mouth." The line that seems to dismiss art's power is followed, within the same breath, by a definition of what art actually is—not a lever pulled on the world, but a mode of existing alongside it, a voice that persists.

This essay argues that the apparent contradiction in Auden's elegy is not a flaw but the truth of the matter, and that it offers the most honest available account of what high culture can do in a world threatened by disaster. Culture's impact is rarely mechanical and almost never immediate. But to conclude from this that it is therefore negligible is to apply the wrong unit of measurement—to ask of poetry the kind of causality we expect from policy, while ignoring the slower, subtler causality through which culture shapes what people are capable of wanting, fearing, imagining, and forgiving.

The Wrong Question: Art as Lever

Part of the anxiety behind Auden's line, written as Europe slid toward war, was the anxiety of a generation of writers—Auden, Spender, Isherwood, Day-Lewis—who had genuinely believed, in the politically charged 1930s, that literature could be a direct political instrument: poets who travelled to Spain, who wrote verse for workers' theatres, who imagined that a sufficiently powerful stanza might shift the course of events. By 1939, with Yeats dead, Spain lost to Franco, and the continent visibly arming itself for a second catastrophic war, that illusion had largely collapsed. Auden's elegy can be read, among other things, as an act of mourning not only for a man but for a certain idea of the poet as prophet-legislator—the idea that art might function as an alternative form of statecraft.

If we judge high culture by this standard—did this novel prevent this war, did this symphony stop this famine, did this essay change this vote—then the verdict is almost always no, and Auden's line stands as an epitaph for naivety. The most celebrated anti-war novels of the early twentieth century did not prevent the rearmament of Europe. The most acclaimed protest songs of the 1960s did not, by themselves, end any war a day sooner than it would otherwise have ended. Measured against the timeline of decisions made in cabinet rooms and general staffs, culture is almost always too slow, too indirect, and too easily ignored by the people who actually hold the levers.

But this standard misunderstands how cultural artifacts actually move through the world. A poem does not act; it is read, by particular people, at particular moments, and what it does is alter, however minutely, the interior furniture of a mind—the assumptions a reader carries unexamined, the images available to them when they try to make sense of an event, the degree to which a stranger's suffering registers as real. Multiply that alteration across decades and populations, and the aggregate effect can be enormous—but it is never traceable in a straight causal line, the way a bomb is traceable to a detonator, or a vote is traceable to a campaign advertisement. To demand that kind of traceability from culture is to ask it to be something it structurally cannot be: an instrument with a single, identifiable trigger, operating on the same timescale as the crises it is asked to address.

There is also a more troubling possibility lurking here, one Auden himself seems to have sensed: the demand that art "do something" immediately is itself a symptom of the emergency it claims to address. A culture that internalizes this demand too completely risks losing exactly what makes it valuable in the long run—its capacity to think on timescales longer than the emergency, and to preserve forms of attention the emergency itself has no use for, but that the world after the emergency will need badly.

The Right Question: Art as Atmosphere

A more useful way to think about culture's impact is in terms of atmosphere rather than action—the slow shaping of the moral climate within which actions later become thinkable or unthinkable. Hannah Arendt argued that totalitarian rule depended on a flattening of the human world: the reduction of unique individuals to interchangeable specimens of a category, which made the bureaucratic administration of mass death psychologically possible.(2)  What made this possible was above all a failure of imagination—an inability, cultivated by the regime's own propaganda, to picture the concrete reality of the people being processed.

Culture's most important political work may be precisely the cultivation of the opposite capacity: the ability to imagine a stranger's interior life vividly enough that harming them becomes psychologically costly. Research on "narrative transportation" suggests sustained engagement with complex narrative increases a reader's capacity to model the mental states of people unlike themselves.(3)  The effect sizes are modest at the level of any individual reader, but the direction is consistent, and it points toward exactly the kind of slow, cumulative, population-level effect that the "lever" model is blind to.

None of this shows up as a discrete "happening." But a population exposed, generation after generation, to the interior lives of people unlike themselves—people of other classes, nations, religions, centuries—is, in aggregate, slightly more resistant to the dehumanizing rhetoric that precedes atrocity. The effect is statistical and cumulative—exactly the kind of effect Auden's line cannot register, because it looks for a single happening rather than a slow change in what is possible.

This atmospheric model also explains something the lever model cannot: why authoritarian regimes devote enormous energy to controlling culture, even when it poses no immediate threat to their power. If poetry really made nothing happen, censors would have no reason to fear poets. But censors have always feared poets, novelists, and historians—not because any single work threatens to overturn a government tomorrow, but because the cumulative effect of free cultural production is a population that thinks differently about what is normal, shameful, and possible. The intensity with which culture is policed is, perversely, some of the best evidence we have for its long-run importance.

A Counter-Voice: Adorno's Doubt

Before going further, the argument needs to face its strongest objection—not Auden's line but a harsher one: Theodor Adorno's much-debated remark that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz had become barbaric.(4)  Adorno's point, stripped of its provocative phrasing, was not that art is powerless—Auden had already conceded that—but that art might be worse than powerless: complicit. The pleasures high culture offers—formal beauty, the satisfactions of a well-made sentence—can function as a moral anaesthetic, letting readers feel they have engaged with suffering when they have only consumed a tasteful representation of it.

This objection has real force. There is something uncomfortable about an essay on the impact of "high culture" being written, and read, by people with the leisure to write and read essays, while others do not have that leisure. The honest response is not to dismiss this discomfort but to notice what it targets: not culture as such, but a relationship to culture in which engagement with art substitutes for, rather than prepares for, engagement with the world. Adorno's later writing did not conclude that art should stop; it concluded that art pretending the catastrophe has not happened has forfeited its claim to seriousness, while art that carries the catastrophe within its own form remains necessary. The danger is not high culture itself but a complacent relationship to it.

The Case of Hubert Butler

It is worth pausing on the namesake of this prize, because Hubert Butler's own career is an unusually clear illustration of the argument. Butler was an essayist, not a politician, and his interventions—most notably his exposure, after the Second World War, of the role played by sections of the Catholic clergy in the wartime forced conversions of Orthodox Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia (5) —made nothing "happen" in the sense Auden meant. He was shouted down at a public meeting in Dublin in 1952 (6)  and effectively marginalized from Irish literary and diplomatic life for years afterward. The essay did not stop the events it described; those events were already over, and the people responsible were, for the most part, never held to account in any forum that mattered.

But Butler's essays did something else, visible only decades later: they kept a true, carefully documented account alive in cultures with strong institutional incentives to forget. When the wars of the 1990s tore Yugoslavia apart along precisely the fault lines Butler had identified forty years earlier, his essays were rediscovered as having named, at considerable personal cost, a wound that official narratives on several sides had preferred to leave unexamined. Butler's writing did not prevent the Balkan wars—nothing so grand can be claimed. But it preserved an alternative memory that later readers could draw on when that understanding became urgently necessary again. This is culture functioning not as lever but as archive of conscience: a deposit that sits dormant until a moment arrives in which it becomes useful in ways its author could not have predicted. Butler died in 1991, the year Yugoslavia began to disintegrate, and did not live to see his own rehabilitation in the country that had once turned its back on him. A model of impact that can only see effects within a news cycle, or even a career, will simply fail to register this kind of contribution—not because it is small, but because it is the wrong shape for that model to detect.

A Less Obvious Case: Serhiy Zhadan in Kharkiv

Butler's case is powerful but it is also, for anyone who has followed the history of this prize, a predictable choice—as predictable, in its way, as pairing Auden with Yeats and Arendt. A less obvious illustration, and one closer to the "world threatened by disaster" of the prompt, is the Ukrainian writer and musician Serhiy Zhadan. (7)  Since the full-scale invasion of 2022, Zhadan has remained in Kharkiv, a city under repeated bombardment, continuing to write poetry, give readings in bomb shelters and metro stations, and organize humanitarian deliveries with the same hands that hold the pen. None of this has altered the trajectory of the war in any way that a general staff would register. By Auden's narrow standard, it is one more confirmation that poetry makes nothing happen even as the missiles fall on the city where it is being read aloud.

And yet something is plainly happening in those shelters that is not nothing, even if it resists the vocabulary of strategic outcomes. For the people listening, the poem is not a distraction from the war but one of the few available ways of metabolizing it—of turning raw, undifferentiated fear into something with shape, rhythm, and a shared audience. Zhadan's continued presence and work has also become, internationally, part of how Ukraine's case is understood by readers who will never set foot in Kharkiv: it supplies the "way of happening, a mouth" through which a besieged city speaks to people who would otherwise know it only as a dot on a map associated with casualty figures. This is the atmospheric model in real time, not retrospect: the poem does not stop the shelling, but it changes what the shelling means to the people enduring it and to the people watching from outside, and that change in meaning is itself a fact about the world, even if it is not the kind of fact that appears in a ceasefire agreement.

High Culture and the Threat of Disaster, Now

The framing of this year's prize—"a world threatened by disaster"—is not abstract. We write this in 2026, with a major war in Europe in its fifth year, with climate disruption a lived experience across the Mediterranean, and with the dehumanizing rhetoric that troubled Arendt regaining confidence. It would be easy to feel that an essay prize, a poetry reading, a string quartet, is at best irrelevant and at worst a distraction—the image of fiddling while a city burns is old precisely because every generation in crisis rediscovers its force.

But this framing gets the relationship backwards. It is precisely in conditions of disaster that the slow work of culture becomes most necessary, because disaster is exactly the condition in which the fast mechanisms—politics, law, diplomacy—are failing or have already failed. When the instruments of immediate action are jammed, the question of what kind of society emerges on the other side depends heavily on what resources of memory, language, and imagination are available to the people who have to do the rebuilding. Post-war Europe was rebuilt not only with the steel of reconstruction programmes but with the literature, music, and historical writing that had survived the war—including works written, like Auden's elegy, in the full knowledge of their own apparent powerlessness.

The fact that Auden's poem "made nothing happen" in 1939, in the narrow sense, did not stop it from becoming, for later readers facing their own catastrophes, a way of articulating grief and resolve that had no other adequate vocabulary. The poem has been quoted since, in eulogies and in private letters written by people in extremity, precisely because it names a problem—the apparent uselessness of art before organized violence—that every generation in crisis discovers afresh and needs language for. That is one of the few things culture reliably can do: provide later generations with a language for experiences that would otherwise remain mute, and therefore harder to think about, harder to share, and harder to act on when action finally becomes possible again.

There is a further dimension specific to 2026: the sheer volume and speed of information now available means the scarce resource is no longer access to facts but the capacity to interpret them—to tell a true, proportionate story from an overwhelming flow of competing, distorted narratives. This is a literary skill as much as a technical one: the habits of close reading and narrative judgment that high culture cultivates are closer to a precondition for resilience than a luxury.

A Classroom in the Val Trompia

A small, concrete version of this tension presented itself a few years ago, teaching Italian and history in a technical institute in the Val Trompia, a valley in Lombardy that has manufactured firearms for centuries and still does. One afternoon the lesson turned to the victims of Nazi-fascism—the deportations, the names, the numbers always too large to hold in the mind as anything other than abstraction. What struck me was not boredom but curiosity: several students, many of whom will work in the same industry their families have worked in for generations, asked questions with surprised attention, as if the material had reached them from an unexpected angle. We were doing this, I could not help noticing, at a moment when sovrantist politics the lesson was implicitly arguing against were regaining confidence across Europe, including not far from that classroom. Nothing about that hour changed what those students' families produce, or will produce. But something shifted for fifty minutes—a set of names became people, an abstraction became a question—and whatever those students carry from that hour is not nothing, even if it is not the kind of thing that shows up in any record.

Conclusion: A Way of Happening

Auden's elegy, read in full, is not a surrender. The stanza containing "poetry makes nothing happen" ends, a few lines later, with poetry as "a way of happening, a mouth"—and a mouth is not nothing. A mouth speaks, and speech, over time, changes what a community can say to itself, what it can admit, what it can forgive, and what it can imagine doing differently next time. High culture's impact on a world threatened by disaster is not measured in disasters averted—a standard by which almost nothing human ever succeeds. It is measured in the texture of the minds that emerge from the disaster: whether they have the imaginative resources to recognize the humanity of those they have been taught to dehumanize, the memory to recognize a familiar catastrophe in unfamiliar clothes, and the language to mourn what has been lost without being destroyed by the mourning.

To return to where this essay began: "poetry makes nothing happen" is true, and also incomplete, and Auden knew both at once—which is why he wrote both halves into the same stanza. Adorno's doubt belongs here too: art that forgets the catastrophe is complicit, but art that carries the catastrophe within its own form—Zhadan reading in a shelter, Butler writing what his own circle preferred not to hear, even a single classroom hour in the Val Trompia—remains necessary precisely because it refuses that forgetting. The honest position is to hold these things together: high culture will almost never be the lever that moves the immediate crisis, but it remains the mouth through which a society speaks to its future self, and the archive that self will need. No law has ever been repealed by a sonnet. But poetry remains, stubbornly, a way of happening—and in a century that may need, above all, people capable of imagining each other across the lines disaster keeps redrawing, that may be the only impact that ultimately matters.

Edoardo Coppi

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(1 ) W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," Part II (1939), in Another Time (London: Faber & Faber, 1940). The three quotations are taken from Part I and Part II of the elegy.

(2) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951); Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963). On the failure of imagination as a structural precondition of administrative evil, see especially Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism, "Totalitarianism."

(3) Raymond A. Mar and Keith Oatley, "The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience," Perspectives on Psychological Science 3, no. 3 (2008): 173-192; David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, "Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind," Science 342, no. 6156 (18 October 2013): 377-380.

(4) Theodor W. Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society" (written 1949, published 1951), in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), p. 34. The full passage reads: "Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today."

(5) The essay in question is "The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue" (1952), in Hubert Butler, The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue and Other Essays, ed. R. F. Foster (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1990).

(6) The confrontation took place at a public meeting of the Irish Association of Civil Liberty / Ballsbridge meeting in Dublin in 1952, where Butler's intervention on the Stepinac affair caused a diplomatic incident. See R. F. Foster's introduction to Butler, The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue, pp. ix-xxviii; and Robert Tobin, The Minority Voice: Hubert Butler and Southern Irish Protestantism, 1900-1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

(7) On Serhiy Zhadan's continued presence in Kharkiv during the Russian bombardment and his readings in metro stations and shelters, see Joshua Yaffa, "A Ukrainian Poet Witnesses the War in His Hometown," The New Yorker, 27 June 2022; and Andrew Roth, "Ukraine's poet of resistance: 'I just can't leave,'" The Guardian, 5 March 2022.