Auden famously states, in his "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," that "poetry makes nothing happen" -- a line usually misunderstood to mean "poetry doesn't make anything happen." But Auden's construct is an active, positive one that casts "nothing" as an occurrence that takes place. Nothing in Latin is nihil, as in "annihilation"; in German, Nichts, as in Vernichtung. During the Second World War, the British Secret Service broadcast lines of poetry into occupied France. Ninety-nine percent of the these lines were meaningless; but once in every hundred signified, to the Resistance listeners who had the code-books, "Now blow up the bridge. Assassinate the general -- now." A man or woman reads a line of poetry into a microphone in London, and in France a bridge blows up -- or not. For Auden, this would be the threat all poetry, wartime or not, poses: each line, in the very recesses of its negation, harbors that potentiality, that immanence (or imminence) -- and poetry, in its eventlessness, becomes (to return to his Yeats elegy) "a way of happening, a mouth."
-- Tom McCarthy, Nothing Will Have Taken Place Except the Place