“‘For poetry makes nothing happen’ is a phrase I would rather have avoided,” Geoffrey Hill remarks wryly, in the closing essay of his Collected Critical Writings. It is territory he has been in before. A 1999 essay, “Language, Suffering, and Silence,” contained an extended rebuke to Auden, primarily focused on what follows from that famous negation:

This “is an error,” Hill judged then: “It trivializes not only the activities of the world of commerce and commodity, which is a power to be reckoned with … but also the various ways in which the overreachings and shortcomings of business might be met with justice… Auden perhaps meant to say that the achieved work of art is its own sufficient act of witness … but I think there are more competent ways of putting it.”

The later Hill is less ex cathedra and (in keeping with a wider shift in his critical and poetic style in recent years) more willing to ironize his own authority, though he does not rescind the content of the judgment. In Auden's place, Hill implies, he should have desired and striven for a more serious claim on behalf of poetry; yet here he is, running up against words so attitudinally decided in their refusal to accord poetry power in the world that their very decision has tended to skew the terms of advocacy for poetry thereafter. “Poetry makes nothing happen” has a currency second only to “art for art's sake” in modern anti-instrumentalist accounts of literary value; unlike “art for art's sake” it does not obviously open the door to alternative talk of aesthetic autonomy. The problem, for Hill, is that, in brushing aside any assertion of poetry's effects in the world, Auden wrong-foots any subsequent writer who would make a more ethically serious claim to nonseriousness: “How can I say,” Hill goes on, “that poetry is, in all the terms one may want to bring to it, unserious, and yet repudiate Auden on the grounds of insufficient seriousness?” (568).