Poetry & Money 2020: A Speculation: 11

Description

Poetry & Money: A Speculation is a study of relationships between poets, poetry, and money from Chaucer to contemporary times. It begins by showing how trust is essential to the creation of value in human exchange, and how money can, depending on conditions, both enable and disable such trustfully collaborative generations of value. Drawing upon a vast range of poetry for its exemplifications, the book includes studies of poetic hardship, religious verse and debt redeeming, the South Sea Bubble and the economic revolution, debates between metallic and paper currency in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as modernist struggles with the gold standard, depression, inflation, and the realised groundlessness of exchange value. With its practitioner's attention to the minutiae of poetic technique, it considers analogies between words and coins, and between poetic rhythm and the circulation of currencies in an economy. Through its close readings of poems over many centuries directly or indirectly engaged with money, it proposes ways in which, while we cannot escape monetary economies, we can resist, to some extent, being ensnared and diminished by them - through a fresh understanding of values money may serve to enable, but ones which are nevertheless beyond price. Cover Contents Preface 1. Introductory issues 2. Money is a kind of poetry 3. Straitened circumstances 4. Indebtedness and redemption 5. Poetic forms containing rampant money 6. For a vast speculation had failed 7. Going off the gold standard 8. Contracts and prophets 9. Circulatory checks and balances 10. Getting value out of money Bibliography Index