Money is a kind of poetry

The title of this chapter is an aphorism from Adagia by Wallace Stevens. What this metaphorical conjoining could mean is unpacked as a further introduction to the complexities surrounding the relationships that poets and poetry may have with money, the theme illustrated by an article by Charles Simic. This aphorism being a form of metaphor, the metaphorical grounding of the book’s exploration is developed here. Stevens’s aphorism has been widely commented on, and a discussion of it includes references to poems by Dana Gioia and William Matthews, as well as remarks by the fictional poet in Humboldt’s Gift. The aphorism is then interpreted in the light of its poet’s two essays on insurance claims, which leads into a discussion of his poem ‘Attempt to Discover Life’, a lyric that concludes with a reference to Cuban currency.

Circulatory checks and balances

The proposal ramified in the previous chapter, namely that the forms of poems can act upon the conditions that they contain, is further explored and exemplified with particular reference to the speed of rhythmic and metrical movement. This is in turn shown to be inversely related to the dictional burden of a poem’s words. The chapter begins by returning to the example of Ezra Pound, and a recent reading of the late Thrones Cantos, a reading which canvases but finally rejects rejects analogies between the numbers of accountancy and those of its poetic metrics. Works by J. H. Prynne, Adrian Stokes, and Geoffrey Hill are then employed to promulgate a conception of poetic rhythm figuring the poet’s technique with regard to language as analogous to a central banker’s means for stabilizing the value of a currency.

For a vast speculation had failed

Chapter six follows the theme of gold versus paper money into the Victorian era by revisiting Thomas Love Peacock’s Paper Money Lyrics and relating it to the history of bank failure upon which the poems satirically descant. Tennyson’s biographical and poetic interest in speculations and the consequences of their failures are followed out in discussions of his ‘Sea Dreams’ and Maud, relating anxieties about valueless promises in investments to the value of the poet’s own words in these poems. It continues the interest in poetic technique by looking particularly at how the rhyming works in money poems by Hood, Browning, Clough and Davidson. It also returns to the theme of poets’ financial straits from Chapter 3, relating it to poetic techniques in, especially, Hood and Davidson.

Indebtedness and redemption

This chapter initiates the series of central studies which address issues related to some four centuries of poetry and money. It considers the metaphorical use of monetary and financial ideas in seventeenth-century secular and sacred poetry with a coda about an eighteenth-century elegy, focusing its discussion upon Christ’s driving the moneychangers from the Temple. Financial metaphors are identified and interpreted in Jonson’s ‘On My First Son’, in various of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, in Donne’s ‘Love’s Usury’, and poems from Herbert’s The Temple. Taking a hint from Donne’s comment on how the last line of a poem ‘mints’ the verse like a hammer blow, it compares and contrasts the forms of ending that these poems achieve. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role played by allusion to Parable of the Talents in ‘On the Death of Dr Robert Levet’.

Straitened circumstances

The most immediate reason why poets, like anyone else, may be interested in money certainly includes their being short of it. This chapter brings together poems that are about problems related first to not having money, and needing to request support from more powerful and wealthy persons, then to means-testing when confronted by someone begging, and how such encounters relate to a poet’s own need for financial support, to problems with charitable giving and distance, leading to a discussion of two poems questioning the value of saving and bequeathing nothing but money. The chapter includes discussions of money-related poems or passages from longer works by Chaucer, Jonson, Johnson, Wordsworth, Graves, Loy, Bishop, Brooks, and Larkin.

Introductory issues

Poetry & Money begins with a moment in a creative writing seminar when the question of value in a piece of writing, and in the creative and critical activities being undertaken, is suddenly challenged by being related to a monetary cost. The questions of value and trust raised, which will be recurrent throughout, are identified with reference to Wallace Stevens’s ‘Imagination as Value’ and Bernard Williams’s Truth and Truthfulness. They are then adumbrated by considering a reference to a payment for magazine publication in a poem by W. S. Graham. Economic pressures in poetry publishing are further illustrated by looking at the publication of a book of poems translated from Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo in the 1970s. Ideas concerning poetry’s role and social value, as expressed in two poems by Roy Fisher written a few years earlier, are then explored.

Contracts and prophets

As its title suggests, this chapter employs a contrast of prophetic and contractual models for poets’ relationships with their readers. It offers close readings of money poems by Lawrence and Kathleen Raine to exemplify aspects of a prophetic orientation, and ones by Auden and Bernard Spencer to exemplify versions of a contractual model. In doing so, it explores, with particular reference to 1930s poetry in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, what may be involved in living within a society and an economic system, and how our compulsory and determined relationships with economic conditions may be differently challenged, shaped, and managed within the micro-economies of poetic forms.

Getting value out of money

Beginning with a number of poems which compare and contrast money and friendship, this final chapter returns to questions of value and evaluation so as to look at ways in which the uses that money may have in a culture are finally dependent upon the identification of values other than monetary ones which it can then be found either to disable or support. The value and evaluation of artworks is addressed by considering Byron’s borrowing from ‘On the Death of Dr Robert Levet’ in his ‘Fare Thee Well’, and on Wordsworth’s critical response on reading the latter poem. The chapter concludes by returning to the pedagogical occasion with which this book began and, with reference to Marcel Mauss on gift-cultures, offers an explanation of how a creative writing workshop, however necessary money values may have been in bringing it about, can occasion, foster, and promulgate values which are necessarily other than ones to be accounted for in balance sheets of monetary investment and return.

Going off the gold standard

This chapter addresses the involvement of two key modernist poets in money and monetary reform. First it considers Pound’s long-term commitment to economic understandings of culture and politics, along with his advocacy for Social Credit by looking at the effect these various views about money had on his poetry. In the course of this exposition it reveals fundamental flaws and contradictory implications in his opposition to a gold standard, his various attempts to fix the value of words, and poems, by relating them to natural processes or material things, and his arguing that states had the power to issue fiat money for the benefit and welfare of citizens. This is followed by a reconsideration of whether T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is a poem significantly influenced by J. M. Keynes’ writings on the Treaty of Versailles, on related issues connected with Eliot’s work as a bank clerk, and his later views about money in the light of his Christian faith. The chapter also addresses the different relationships between attention to money and anti-Semitism in both poets’ work.

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.