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"Think globally, act locally"
Hubert Butler
HUBERT BUTLER ESSAY PRIZE 2026
The title of this year’s essay is:
“Poetry makes nothing happen” (W.H.Auden). What impact can high culture make in the real world?
The quotation in the essay title is taken from Auden’s elegy for Yeats, written in 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. In times of global conflict, there can be an acute awareness of the impotence of art. What impact, if any, can high culture have in a world threatened by disaster?