Indeed …

… Thank You, Auden! | Chronicles Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The world about us is full of gross evils and great misery by which any decent person is appalled; but it is a fatal delusion and a shocking over-estimation of the importance of the artist in the world to suppose that by making works of art we can do anything to eradicate the one or alleviate the other. The political history of Europe would be what it has been if Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Titian, Michelangelo, Mozart, Beethoven, et al. had never existed.