A Poetry of Pigs

Ada Limon likens poets to soothsayers. But poets seem to me no wiser or more visionary than anyone else—possibly the opposite is closer to the truth. Poems in general aren’t so much wise or fortune-telling things as they are (some of them; no generalization does justice to the art) providers of concise moments of clarity.
T.E. Hulme, in “A Lecture on Modern Poetry,” which he gave to the Poets’ Club in London in 1908, said "I want to speak of verse in a plain way as I would of pigs: that is the only honest way. The President [of the Club] told us last week that poetry was akin to religion. It is nothing of the sort."

Auden’s incessantly quoted “poetry makes nothing happen” from “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” is less interesting than what he says next: “it survives/In the valley of its making…/…A way of happening, a mouth.”
“A way of happening”: That has always seemed a fine way to describe poetry. In “Poets at Work,” Auden also says “It is a sobering experience for any poet to read the last page of the Books section of the Sunday Times where correspondents seek to identify poems which have meant much to them. He is forced to realise that it is not his work, not even the work of Dante or Shakespeare, that most people treasure as magic talismans in time of trouble, but grotesquely bad verses written by maiden ladies in local newspapers; that millions in their bereavements, heartbreaks, agonies, depressions, have been comforted and perhaps saved from despair by appalling trash while poetry stood helplessly and incompetently by.”
Of course maidens and non-maidens, gents and ladies, are equally responsible for bad poetry.
Auden also said “Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.”
I get exercised about poetry being compared to truth-telling because it seems to me a great way to get fools who think they know the truth to write or read poems, and to discourage those who know they don’t know the truth from writing or reading them. Not-knowing, confusion: Surely these states lead to better poems than certainty.