Dehradun, Oct. 26 -- 'Poetry makes nothing happen,' wrote WH Auden in his elegy for YB Yeats who died in 1939. The line is often taken out of context as a critique of literary culture in general though a subsequent line of the poem disavows this interpretation with the affirmation that the arts are crucial to the survival of human culture. To reduce literature to its usefulness, in a utilitarian sense, is to miss the sheer pleasure of the word and sound that make it literature in the first place. The life that literature really equips us to live is not the one Wordsworth derided as devoted to 'getting and spending', but the other life of inwardness and imagination. Unlike the sciences, humanities are not considered utilitarian or having pra...