Irish [and English and American] Poets, Learn Your Trade

Abstract

he puzzle is why poetry has so little contact with the business of ordinary life. Robert Frost is an exception, but even so ideological a poet as Auden refrains from being bleared with trade. Yeats in particular, a conservative, disdained trade, though urging poets to learn theirs. The very word “poetry,” of course, is from “thing made,” and the puzzle deepens. St. Thomas Aquinas had raised making by people to the dignity of God’s making, at least poetically. And yet. We have The Oxford Book of Love Poetry and The Oxford Book of the Sea, with battles and botanical observations (“Nothing gold can stay”), and yet the economy, even after the invention of economics by the Scots in the eighteenth century, is set aside. It has left poets and their readers in law and literature and politics proud to be thus ignorant. The sacred and the profane in fact are entangled.