W.H. Auden famously wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen." Elaine Scarry argues precisely the opposite, that there is an "ethical power" to poetry, and literature more broadly, that has helped tame our capacity for injuring others. Here she discusses the power of beauty:
Contact with the beautiful has one additional effect. Diotima tells Socrates who tells Plato who tells us that coming into the presence of a beautiful person or thing gives rise to the desire to bring children into the world. Diotima says contact with the beautiful also gives rise to the desire to create poems, legal treatises, and works of philosophy. Modern philosophers such as Wittgenstein have said the same. Recognizing our own capacity for creating is again a prerequisite for working for justice: while beauty can be either natural or artifactual, justice is always artifactual; it always takes immense labor to bring it about. So anything that awakens us to our own power of creation is a first step in working to eliminate asymmetries and injuries.
The Dish 