Poetic forms containing rampant money

This chapter begins with the South Sea Bubble and the Financial Revolution by bringing to light an anonymous Jacobite Pindaric ode written in response to the consequences of this emblematic boom and bust. Other poems or passages on the Bubble by Anne Finch, Gay, Swift and Pope are drawn upon in an exploration of how poetic form may attempt to manage and counteract the rise of stocks and shares, notes of exchange and paper currency. The repeatedly evoked contrast between metallic coin, especially gold, and these fiduciary symbols of value is identified in such poems as Pope’s ‘Of the Use of Riches’ and then followed into the Romantic period in poems by Keats, Shelley and Byron. This distinction is found to influence Shelley’s ‘Defence of Poetry’ through the association between precious metals and poetic value in the essay by Thomas Love Peacock to which it responds.