Hero Clues and Other Poems

About the Book

What did W. H. Auden mean when he said that poetry makes nothing happen? He wasn’t announcing—in poetry, mind you—that poetry has no purpose and serves no function whatsoever. His memorial to William Butler Yeats, where this line is to be found, tells us a different story. Certainly, poetry doesn’t make everything happen, but those things that can be said to be good—to be a part of that complex abstraction Plato and Aristotle called the highest good—involve poetry at its most fundamental level of meaning. Perhaps Shelley said it best when he wrote in his Defence of Poetry that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. They speak truth to fact, or as Shelley put it simply, “a poem is the image of life expressed in its eternal truth.” That somewhat paradoxical line of Auden’s is a strategic call to the reader, a gage thrown at his feet, and a challenge to find, recognize, and celebrate all the things that poetry is and what the poet does. No, we gently chide the poet, poetry makes so much happen. And Mr. Auden, your poem that’s such a moving paean to the power of imagination wedded to words—poetry, you know—has the power to move our souls, to touch the deepest part of us. That, Mr. Auden, is something, something pretty amazing and well worth celebrating.

About the Author

Lewis E. Birdseye earned a PhD from Columbia and has been an educator for much of his life. In addition, he has worked as a high-rise construction worker, a professional river guide on the Chatooga River, has run fifteen marathons and several ultra marathons, and has toured by bicycle much of Europe—from above the Arctic Circle in Norway to the islands of the Aegean Sea. He lives in Eugene, Oregon, with his hospitalist wife, and together they tend to their organic garden. He is the author of five works of fiction: Vastation, The Unsubdued Forest, In My Beginning, The Gate of Ivory, and The Gate of Horn. His lifelong wish has been to be a poet or a river otter living on a wild and scenic river far from the madding crowd.