Poetry makes nothing happen, Auden said. Maybe so, but a poem can capture the essence of a moment in words that resonate long after the events have faded from memory.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats’s evocation of post-World War I political turmoil is as relevant today as when The Second Coming was published in 1920. Where do we see passionate intensity in our domestic and global politics? Where do we see lack of conviction?

Passion seems to be the exclusive province of the radical right in America, in Western Europe and in the Middle East. Religious extremism, ideological orthodoxy, and nativist nationalism burn with their own internal fires, while secular liberalism flutters ineffectually like a moth without a flame.

Peggy Noonan, the grande dame of Republican ideologues, took her party to task in her Saturday column for what she called “the GOP’s brand problem.”

“The cliché is that Republicans are old, white, don’t like women or science, are narrow, numeric and oppose all modern ways,” she wrote (WSJ 9/27/14). They have no “declared governing purpose.” They “need to say what they’re for,” not just what they’re against—namely Obama.

The problem is bipartisan. Democrats also struggle to declare a galvanizing governing purpose. President Obama’s approval rating is not a life raft Democrats can cling to. In their search for heat and light, they have swarmed to the passionate intensity of Elizabeth Warren – the brightest shooting star in the firmament of the left.

When Warren sprang upon the stage in 2012, she shocked the political world with her rhetoric and her substance. She said what she was against: the rigged, too big to fail, taxpayer-bailed-out financial system. And she said what she was for: consumer protection, financial regulation, leveling the playing field for the average citizen. She spoke bluntly without equivocation. Her populist tropes were not mere campaign slogans. Her long published record staked out specific policy positions backed up by decades of academic research. Though a political unknown, her convictions were thoroughly documented and her style was full of passionate intensity. She was dynamic. She was folksy. She was specific and concrete. She flourished statistics with the flair of a revival preacher.

Running for the seat that had been Kennedy’s, she articulated the liberal cause more resoundingly than anyone since Kennedy. Fifty-four percent of the voters in that election liked what they saw, heard, and felt.

Launched, she shot like a meteor to national prominence. She quickly became a spokesperson, a standard-bearer, a fund-raiser, a presidential possibility.

Back to Peggy Noonan: “… a political brand problem gets resolved only by a vivid figure like FDR or Reagan…”

Elizabeth Warren’s meteoric ascendancy may only reveal the shallowness of the bench, or it may be the real thing: the emergence of a vivid, transformational figure who declares a new governing purpose in cadences that inspire, unite, and motivate.

Senator Warren will be speaking October 9 to a breakfast gathering of the New England Council. An e-mail from the Council on September 26 announced that the event is sold out—two weeks in advance. These events rarely fill up, but 300 people have signed up to hear her speak at 8 a.m. on a Thursday. This is by no means the only venue she has filled. She does it all across the country.

If political speech is a form of poetry (the Supreme Court has yet to rule on the question), then it may be time to challenge both Yeats and Auden. No, the best do not lack conviction; and yes, political poetry can make things happen.

Gary Kaplan is the executive director of JFYNetWorks, a Boston-based non-profit provider of blended learning programs to schools and colleges.