Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney challenges WH Auden's statement that 'poetry makes nothing happen" in order to assert the key role that poetry has played throughout the 20th century. Illustrating his talk with reference to Osip Mandelstam and Dylan Thomas , WB Yeats and TS Eliot , and Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath , and drawing extensively on BBC archives, Heaney's passionately argued piece concludes with a magnificent rendition of his own poem written after the recent death of Joseph Brodsky , a friend and fellow poet. Producer Beaty Rubens