Poetry, A Late Economy

How is poetry, an essential non-asset, valued in a late capitalist economy? Robert Graves’ candid axiom that ‘there is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money either’ lays bare the ongoing frustrations those who labour for poetry regularly experience. It also suggests an integrity to the form, perhaps mocking professions whose sole incentive is financial gain – or is this a subtle notion of purity? 

Poetry has always found ways to resist the dictums of capitalism. The metrics for what constitutes a ‘good’ poem are subjective to each reader, rather than adhering to the very binary logic of say supply and demand. If a reader is able to engage with a poem then we would agree there is value in that, but this form of speculation is constructed around a personal set of aesthetics, thoughts, feelings, and attachments, ones that require constant negotiation, making value-forms arbitrary and conditional. Art’s great invitation is that it requires only engagement, which can happen irrespective of wealth, status, geography or academic accomplishment. 


There are of course wider and more collectively agreed critical markers, gathered and consolidated by those working within the profession at a practising and pedagogical level, which help to establish a standard of quality. Yet such peer-dependent theory arguing what a ‘successful’ poem must comprise of is not written in stone. With public tastes in constant flux, part of poetry’s democracy is to never fully settle for too long on the side of a certain mode – be that mainstream lyric, traditional formalism, spoken word or more radical and avant-garde approaches. Some of the most popular books in British poetry over the last few years suggest these modes are constantly being reviewed and revised. Online spats will continue to ensue among writers, readers and educators of poetry, defending or lambasting particular styles. Coteries will form and poetics will be ratified or vetoed through arbitrary judging committees. Such insular deliberations means the intricacies and politics of the poetry world stay largely hidden from general scrutiny, while perceived value systems are publicly redrawn by whichever cohort has been appointed to judge a major prize. 


Review culture, where books of poetry would traditionally be openly evaluated, has either fallen into abeyance under the pressure media outlets have faced in the battle for space and traction, or they’ve simply become promotional puff-pieces. The labour that goes into reviewing a book, the layers of thought and unpicking, is so poorly remunerated that those who have the ability and means to produce such writing without seeming reactionary, mean-spirited or simply opening and concluding with I don’t get it, have since capped their pens. 


If prize culture is precarious and whimsical, and review culture is in steady decline, how does poetry survive along with those invested in its production? This leads onto the central question I find myself returning to: what is it about poetry that keeps it so undervalued in economic terms? What is it about a set of agonised-over words, assembled in such a way so as to instruct or invoke the atmosphere of a strange tertiary space, that those with an interest in the human condition, in language, arts and culture see such little monetary value in its result? If we compare poetry to say, comedy or music or film or dance or visual art, and we agree that those who sit at the top of those forms are living comfortably off or from their art, is poetry’s inability to move beyond itself its own shortcoming? But then it’s all relative and proportionate to the market value of an artform, which presumably the people and their needs decide on. 


In the sixties and seventies poets such as Pablo Neruda and Allen Ginsberg filled auditoriums from The Royal Albert Hall to The Roundhouse in London with a good few thousand people. Today we might see pop poets who launched their careers on social media fill a few hundred seats, but their poetry by and large lacks the critical engagement from other poets to foster it into the community. Has the shift in attitude resulted in the schisms and factions which currently dominate poetry, or has social media and the proliferation of Instagram poets widened the divide between the new mainstream and other poetics? I ask these questions not as a poet or publisher, or a capitalist, or socialist, I ask them as a means to understand how the payoffs for poetry making are demarcated – at both a cultural and financial level. How writers of the form sustain themselves through publishing, teaching, commissions and live performances. 

If we were to think of poetry as a commodity, it would be one with varying degrees of financial potential which range from how much a poet might receive for a manuscript, all the way through to how much they can expect to be paid for teaching, lecturing and live readings. All these factors are determined by a myriad of more intricate conditions which all find expression when the poet comes to publish their book(s). The general consumer who is often impartial and more curious than zealous, might be susceptible to the campaigns of the commercial publishing machine. In order to understand the true machinations surrounding popularity and mass appeal, we must first consider how value from within a cultural and late capitalist framework enshrines itself, before we can understand the ways in which it’s applied to poetry.  

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labour value

The fee for a live poetry reading in England can range from £0 (organisers offer to cover travel and accommodation) to upwards of £500, depending on a poet’s profile. Universities are renowned for not only paying embarrassingly less, but requiring several gruelling hours of admin from the poet before they’re eligible to claim their fee, which on average is currently around £150 for a day’s work. 

Poets can expect a manuscript to be bought anywhere between £200 to £5000. The higher the advance the longer it takes to earn it out, and with poetry sales being relatively low poets will likely never receive royalties for their work. In terms of direct payments for poems accepted by literary magazines, a small honorarium will be offered, essentially licensing the rights to reproduce the piece over time. Again these can range from £20 to £300 depending on the magazine. Yet whole poems can now be reproduced and read for free online. Poets, publishers and readers on Twitter (now X?) and Instagram have adopted the kind of energy found in an 18th century cheese factory; at times it’s outward and resourceful, at others formulaic and self-serving, with poets and readers relentlessly sharing classic and contemporary works in the name of celebration and generosity but which also inadvertently reinstates its own kind of value system. 

At the time of writing there are only four major literary prizes per year that centre or include poetry: the T.S. Eliot Prize, The Forward Prizes, the RSL Ondaatje Prize and The Folio Prize, meaning there is very little scope to fully acknowledge the variation of voices the UK features. 70% of the funding awarded by Arts Council England (ACE) comes from the National Lottery and the remaining 30% from the Treasury. This money feeds and sustains whole arts organisations, festivals, publishers, venues and individuals who all depend on grants to help develop their creative practice, as well as a wider range of other literary pursuits. Factored within such decision making comes the politics of the Arts Council: there might be regional zones which deserve urgent stimulation and investment who will be in direct competition with the more traditionally favoured spaces of the metropole. There are also ongoing attempts to use specific arts funding to repair the social fabric torn apart by austerity by means of community initiatives and engagement projects, rather than just funding  individual artists. 

For those working as pure practitioners within the sector, there is little chance of generating enough revenue to fund the time it takes to write a book, along with the materials and labour that go with it. There is essentially one hand (ACE) feeding the many thousands of people who aspire to write and publish poetry in the UK. The oversubscribed and gladiatorial nature of the poetry business means there has always been a propensity for infighting, envy and toxicity. Now, with such finite alternatives and outlets to gain recognition, the value poets, readers and industry professionals place on prizes has increased ten-fold. Cliques are subsequently formed around shared gripes, geographic proximities, and higher education certifications. 

Poets in the UK have long been in conversation and connection with US poets, but the American market is six times the size of the UK’s, and contains a greater proportion of MFA programmes at higher education level which are heavily subsidised by large fee paying students, foundations and individual donors. This means American poets can expect to receive much higher remittance rates for their work, compared to those countries which rely on negligible government subsidies and local handouts. That’s not to appear in favour of privatisation – the obvious corollary is that it impels exclusion, privileging those with inherited wealth and/or other means to advance their careers – but to highlight the difference in infrastructure and development. The United States, as well as having a more multivalent literary tradition due to its history of mass migration, slavery and colonialism, also has triple the amount of prizes, fellowships and grants. But America is also a country predicated on extremes, on a Calvinist work ethic and a hyper-capitalist model of individualism. America’s job is to keep America obsessed with itself, its politics, hierarchies, statuses, and networks. The UK, albeit a smaller country where such attitudes are less pronounced, is not too dissimilar in how it establishes arbitrary value systems through a parallel apparatus, the one glaring difference being in the amount of money readily available for poets, what they can command and what is deemed worthy of being paid.

The music industry has services like PRS (Performing Rights Society) who work to ensure that whenever a song is played, the artist is remunerated. If shops or any other public space play or stream music and fail to pay their PRS licence fee, they stand to incur fines for what is rightly considered theft. Of course, the appetite for music far exceeds that of poetry,  but shouldn’t the logic be shared on a transactional level? Imagine if each time a poem was viewed on a website, the poet received a royalty fee for their work. After all, if magazines generate revenue above all from subscribers, with additional monies coming in the form of ads and sponsorships, then arguably it’s the labour of poets that attracts and sustains those subscribers, so why shouldn't poets be remunerated for it? In this context, it could be argued that the poem itself is being exploited by its very own mode of reproduction. But again we must return to the blunt truth which is that this is poetry, where profit margins are negligible and most organisations are reliant on funds and grants from external bodies to keep them above water. Perhaps it’s exactly for those reasons that people who labour, sacrifice and endeavour to make inroads in the sector commit themselves to it so fully. The reward is not necessarily financial: being held and regarded in good esteem by a community of poets and publishers is its own unique accolade. The capital gained is social and cultural, but still poets too have bills to pay. 

Compared to other artistic and literary disciplines, it’s fair to say that poetry has long established itself as art’s last remaining non-asset. Each artform has its pockets of successful art-makers, who generate enough revenue from their art to achieve financial stability and the ability to live comfortably off their practice. But at a production level even the most decorated living poets who have over several decades become household names still feel the sector’s limitations as they approach their 8th or 9th collection. 

When the late poet John Ashbery was asked towards the end of his life whether he made his living entirely from the sales of the poetry books he published, he laughed: ‘God no, I’ve made my living from the teaching of poetry.’ The largest source of stable income for poets tends to come from pedagogy, in light of the assumed idea that more people want to learn how to write poetry than consume it, making poetic practice and thought a commodifiable skill. The relation of academia and teaching to poetry is in itself a vast and separate subject. If universities were once hailed as a refuge for poets, where critical thought and development could be nurtured, they now are faced with increasing marketisation and cuts that jeopardise this essential income stream and the benefits it holds for future writers.

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personal value

A question I often put to poets is what do you want from poetry? Occasionally, someone might remark they have no interest in publishing or finding readers. For them, writing poetry is simply an outlet, a vehicle for individual expression and catharsis: whoever wishes to come along for the duration is more than welcome. The majority, however, display deference to the craft, how impossible it is to get right in order to be recognised by the precarious reward schemes of publishing, accolades and readerships. Lastly, and perhaps most crucially, they express a desire to be read and taken seriously by other poets. 

In poetry and writing in general there is of course the pleasure and satisfaction of the making. The years dedicated to reading, writing and experiment, scratching in the dark until something begins to materialise. Then there is everything that comes after a book of poems has been written – the laden anxiety in the run-up to publication coupled with the physicalisation of experience through formulated verse. Only through completing a collection of poems can a poet appreciate the satisfaction that derives from organising abstract feelings, and the transformations that arise through the writing process itself. 

Pursuing this process isn’t free: it’s work and work involves time, money, resources and investment – the labour of writing poems. Capitalism wants a tangible product it can clearly measure so as to assign it with an exchange value. It needs a product to be extractive and utilitarian. We understand the value of a property, the value of a haircut, a nice meal, but poetry is asking for subjective and speculative value which is far more difficult to quantify as it’s not underpinned by reality.  

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cultural value

In traditional book form poetry operates around a set of value markers distinct from those of spoken word, theatre or live music. The author and their cultural influence become the tangible product necessitating a retail price. If we consider a book of poetry as a transactional article, something tangible and capable of being fetishised, cherished and used as adornment then we begin to understand a poetry book as an artefact, an extension of the poet’s life, subjectivities and interiority. A published poetry collection can be viewed in this way as holding the value of (rather than for) a poet, with emphasis being placed on the fluctuating currency of their own cultural capital. 

A poetry book’s lifespan can be measured out by the continued demand for it in print or its cultural relevance, a term often employed to spotlight and privilege books which address salient aspects of modernity. In capitalist terms, that’s enough to induce a currency of value which remains dependent on the reader’s personal value criteria. Again we face the same recurring issue: in a sector starved of money, space and robust criticism, how do books find their readers? Like their authors, the majority of books will have to undergo their own deaths eventually. Depending on how willing a poet is to devote themselves to self-promotion, or actively seek out readings and performances in order to mitigate the decline of its visibility over time, a single book of poetry can have at first a relatively healthy outreach. It’s the following phase which proves the more strenuous: the publisher’s resources have been stretched to their limits and  those in close proximity to the poet have already made their purchase, meaning the book now is in direct competition with a broader, more dynamic and commercial milieu who move en masse. If publicity is limited to the pageantry of social media and promotional newsletters, then the chances general readers have of discovering new work is lessened by its dependence on algorithms with a circumscribed limited reach. This means a book’s lifespan remains reliant on prize culture, independent reviews, recommendations from recognised tastemakers such as the Poetry Book Society (PBS) who appoint fellow poets to select several key books a quarter and the curation of bookshops. 

After several months from publication it becomes evident the initial buzz has dissipated, prompting the poet to reluctantly start thinking about their next project. Left to stand on its own two feet, the book finally adopts a more organic subsistence, finding new readers through a gradual and serendipitous route. The poet eventually senses sales have stalled: online praise seems less frequent and invites to readings or festivals are now few and far between. The news comes that the publisher is planning to discontinue the title. But by then the poet is already working on the next book which is released seven years later and is met with strong critical acclaim, before going on to win a prestigious prize. There’s now some mainstream news coverage and a stream of healthy reading appointments, spurring new readers to scout the internet for previous titles the poet published. Third party sellers on Ebay or Amazon are selling the poet’s second collection Askance, originally priced at £8.99, for £43. The fact it’s not available new has hiked up the price. These are now collectors’ editions. Another seller offers a special signed edition at a starting bid of £90. Poetry mavens who have the means frantically strive to outbid each other, while the original publisher either lacks the funds to produce another print run, or has folded its business altogether. The irony is that once a book is discontinued by the publisher its value stands a greater chance of appreciating if the poet’s succeeding collections win the affection of judges, critics and fellow poets.

If a book is successful it supplants the author’s reputation and begins to form a value of its own. We’re all familiar with the poetry of Seamus Heaney, but there’s always that particular collection, say Death of a Naturalist, we seem to hold in higher regard than the rest of his oeuvre. Another capitalist argument: if a book of poetry becomes so popular why doesn't the market adjust the price to align with supply and demand? We know of antiquarian booksellers selling rare first editions of Hemingway, Faulkner and Joyce but why pay hundreds of pounds when you could read the exact same text for £10.99? Like a painting, the marking of a first edition is what sets a value. Libraries and estates will most likely hold back original manuscripts, meaning the closest collectors and enthusiasts can get to owning a piece of literature is through a first edition copy, yet the figures for first editions of poetry can never be matched with the sums offered for novels, paintings or even the notebooks of dead musicians. 

A copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1922 and deemed the most famous poem of the 20th century, shares the same retail ticket as that of any other book published within the last year. Ironically, as books become canonised their retail value stagnates or falls, but their cultural value increases exponentially, hence why publishers offer alternative cover variants, hardback gift editions etc., in a bid to try to stoke new sales of famous books (albeit at a price usually reflective of their market value, which is in turn what the market is willing to pay). 

The majority of poetry books that go out of print are unlikely to resurface with fresh ink once the file’s closed. The costs involved in reprinting are too high for smaller presses, the sales too low. The difference between, say, painting and poetry is that paintings cannot in essence be reproduced in the way text can, meaning a replica or a reprint will all be deemed inferior upon inspection. An original Cézanne painting, for instance, has reached a value of $137 million, whereas the original manuscript of The Waste Land, which is currently at the Berge Collection at the New York Public Library, is free for members to access through an appointment but cannot be purchased. Yet a copy of the text can be bought for as little as 99p or read for free online. It’s the exact same words Eliot chose some 101 years ago, the difference being today the name T.S. Eliot is synonymous with the advent of modernism, which has become imbued with its own cultural standing – a value form unto itself, but one that might not necessarily translate economically in non-English speaking countries. 

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poetic thought and speculation

Each individual artform requires a specific method of application. When a poet writes and a reader reads, what exactly is being rendered and how does a poem come to permeate one’s reading-mind? Another question I put forward is: when a poem is read, what happens? Poets, theorists, educators and editors all defend their propositions on what constitutes a credible poem, and if we had to find a common denominator among this medley, it would fall somewhere in line with the ability of a poet to think in poetry. We may write in English but we think in poetry, and it’s this material currency of poetic thought that establishes the first stages of its value. The reader, depending on a poet’s poetics, is invited to apply meaning to language, rather than language serving the physical world and conventional meaning.


There’s also the relation of commodification to speculation – what Marx labelled as ‘fictitious capital’ – something that seems at first glance to be more applicable to visual art, the value of which is in its potential to amass wealth rather than being fastened to any component of reality. Yet what is being constantly assessed and commercialised through commissions and publishing deals are the poet’s ideas, or the commodification of poetic thought and speculation. Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory that:

A contradiction of all autonomous art is the concealment of the labour that went into it, but in high capitalism, with the complete hegemony of exchange value and with contradictions arising out of that hegemony, autonomous art becomes both problematic and programmatic at the same time.

Thinking in poetry requires a certain kind of specialist labour, a brain-type robust in abstract and lateral thought, capable of thinking along divergent lines, evincing a strong emotional core: that which capitalism comes to regard as a ‘negative dialectic’, to again borrow from Adorno. Poetry in its pure anti-capitalist approach is most outwardly present in the modes of spoken word, rant and dub poetry and among certain swathes of Marxist and avant-garde poets; all reject the idea of capital, investment, commodification and profitability at the levels of both subject and language. 


A counter-argument to the anti-capitalist approach can be delineated through attempting to spin poetic thought into a useful and sellable product by perceiving it as an entity that’s utilitarian. In today’s landscape the shift towards confessional literalism and anecdotalism, both descendants of the lyric tradition and capitalism's requisite to have use-value clearly defined, have led to more poems being ‘about’ a subject or event rather than ‘around’ it. The move to have a poem directly correspond to its emotionality, intention and meaning is just one major symptom of the pressure capitalism puts on poetic thought, a result of its desire to make the product appealing for all to appreciate, understand…and sell. The idea of a reader being astute and expansive enough to apply their own meaning to a poem is anathema to the late capitalist mindset. 

Formal difficulty is considered a niche, a non-commodity, a more tricky negotiation, assuming the masses to be too well adjusted to the insipid dross of mainstream popular culture. A poem which employs clearer or more simplistic ideas through its language formation so as to ensure meaning-making is less obfuscated, panders to the extractive, utilitarian function of capitalism, which demands a transactional exchange of poetry as an everyday appliance, where meaning can be easily identified and lifted out from the language so as to benefit or enhance the reader’s life instantly. In the kind of poems capitalism endorses language is no longer subjective, porous or experiential, associative or democratic in its invite. It’s now direct in its address, solipsistic, didactic, earnest, rhetorical and borderline clichéd. It’s guiding the reader through the poem’s terrain. Within those kinds of poems we feel the poet to be positioning their speakers as knowers, as life coaches, as moral guides, as soothsayers, as prophets. Keats’ idea of negative capability or Eliot’s objective correlative are hung out to dry, as terms like accessibility, relevance and importance all now work to denote a new value form. 


While certain elder statesmen might have had their time, and their influence will most likely never fully wane, the shift towards more lyric or spoken word-adjacent poetics appears symptomatic of a larger cultural impulse. It signals a  rejection of autonomy in favour of a collective understanding of what a poem is doing and what it’s about. The need to reduce poetry down to a singular function – i.e poems are really here to teach us how to empathise with each other, or they help fortify social cohesion – is partly the result of its history in resisting capitalist structures. An artform hinging on indeterminacy, on unregulated, mercurial methods of production which capitalism fails to properly assimilate, feels it has to prove itself to the overlords of capital by pitching itself first and foremost as offering a service, a tool, a utility, corroborating neoliberal substructures to justify its place in the free market. 


These pressures are acutely articulated by a new generation of social media poets (poets who write with a social media audience in mind, not poets with a social media account) who can be found bankrolling large portions of the poetry industry. The key to gaining traction is to duplicate an aesthetic the market easily recognises and so can instantly validate, one which straddles an almost self-help quasi-wisdom through the use of chopped up lines to give the effect of poetic verse. And yet, a poem is still a poem irrespective of who opposes its literary merits, or harangues its trope-laden doggerel. Capitalism wants to see The Best. It wants masses of followers which it can regard as potential consumers. It conflates popularity with preeminence. It wants a string of accolades which can be subsumed into sales. It wants hierarchies, and of course it wants losers in order to contour and elevate the pedestal status of the singular winner; it’s not interested in friendships, in mentors, in a community of vulnerable and volatile participants, or the unfettered terrain of the human imagination, it seeks and promotes competition, thriving off antagonism and aggression. It wants axiomatic dominance by use of its own subjective schema. 

If the common perception of poetry is now that of a literal poetic lyric saturated in hackneyed thought, then how does that impact poetry which is working on a more technical, academic or experiential level? Have confessional poetics monopolised the market to the point they make other styles of poetry appear impossible and impenetrable? To large swathes of the population, value is set by what they can see themselves reflected in or what speaks to them directly – a by-product of hyper-individualisation, where commodities are valued by how easily they can be consumed rather than how they can be negotiated by the reader, or made to unsettle the senses – poetry’s most ambitious and now most regularly assailed attribute. 

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net value or non-value

Over time, a poet’s cultural cachet will fluctuate. It would be remiss of a poet to expect a career spent entirely under the spotlight, or to have work which is constantly changing focus received or praised in exactly the same way. At the end of a life spent working in language, what a poet will be left with could be thought of as the ‘net value’ of their labour. Let’s suppose we were to start unspooling the thread of poets, critics and academics bemoaning poetry’s monetary deficit. We would most likely end up in the same place as they all did, but of course, it’s poetry, what did you expect! 


No writer can predict the impact their work will have and nor should they. Awards, reviews, publishing deals, shortlists, public profiles and appointments are in the grand scheme of things facile extensions of capitalism, each existing outside the poet’s jurisdiction while having little to no say in what work is the most deserving. All should appeal far less to a curious mind engaged in a lifelong pursuit of artfulness, invention, poetic thought and feeling.

When a poet does come to prominence, what those outside the sector see is often the end result of years of writing, reading, mentorship, education, time and money. A clean investment even by capital’s standards. But what if poetry started to reward its writers with enough money to own a home, to pay off their debut, own land or an expensive watch… who then might it attract? Perhaps the saving grace is that those drawn to the artform are not coming at it to acquire wealth or increase their property portfolio, but to participate in something more human and indeterminate. Something that can’t be directly valued or sold using a neoliberal model of exchange. 


The properties of poetry, of meaning-making, of the experience of imagination and interpretation are limitless, forcing it to exist somewhere in capitalism’s hinterland. It’s out here, in the dank backwoods where poets bring the complexity and difficulty of thought and feeling which simplified value systems are unable to contain. Perhaps poetry’s outlasting function is not in its ability to manipulate and exploit its consumer, but rather in what it can add. And that exchange exceeds and undermines with great ferocity the current value system consecrated under late capitalism.    

Anthony Anaxagorou FRSL is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist and publisher. His third collection, Heritage Aesthetics (Granta, 2022), won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2023 and was shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award. It was listed as one of New Statesman’s top books of 2022. His second collection, After the Formalities (Penned in the Margins, 2019) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize along with the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. It was also a Telegraph and Guardian poetry book of the year.
He has also published How To Write It (Merky Books, 2020); a practical guide fused with tips and memoir looking at the politics of writing as well as the craft of poetry and fiction along with the wider publishing industry. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press. He is the editor-in-chief of Propel Magazine, an online literary journal featuring the work of poets yet to publish a first collection.
In 2019 he was made an honorary fellow at the University of Roehampton. In 2023 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.