Poetry and Uselessness: From Coleridge to Ashbery

W.H. Auden famously claimed "poetry makes nothing happen." Through chapters on figures from Coleridge and Tennyson to Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Gertrude Stein and John Ashbery, we see how maintaining that poetry has no use in the world has been and remains a very powerful-and useful-idea.