How can that be?
For no very good reason I can think of, the idea of the Businessman/Poet intrigues the reading public no end. (If a surgeon plays the violin in a chamber group no one gives it a second thought.) Perhaps the two stereotypes, the “hardnosed” businessman and the “Romantic” poet, are at opposite ends of some spectrum, making their juxtaposition the more striking. Wallace Stevens, is everyone’s first example, but the list would also include T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams (not a businessman but a pediatrician).
Of course, no one is interested in Eliot or Stevens as men of affairs; as businessmen they left no mark. Why should we care, 80 years later, about a junior accountant at Lloyds Bank or a VP-Legal at Hartford Life?) Their distinction as poets is the only conceivable reason for the public’s interest in the subject. (Conversely can you imagine any public interest in a list of prominent businessmen who wrote negligible poetry?)
Perhaps the Businessman/ Poet is interesting to people as a descendant of the Renaissance Man. Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Philip Sydney were Renaissance men both literally and figuratively, having careers in diplomacy and government to match their achievements as poets.
My own experience of people’s reaction to a Businessman/Poet is covered by Samuel Johnson’s remark, on observing the performance of a circus dog walking upright on its hind legs: Such a feat is notable not because the creature does it well, but because he does it at all. (For me the rewards have included the occasional dog biscuit.)
But business and poetry are more alike than either knows. I view both of them as organizing activities that are carried out by the self in response to a chaotic world. That is why making a poem or “making a deal” in business gives me a pleasure akin to cleaning up the kitchen after a meal: It is the creation of order rather than the consumption of it. The lyric poet delights in making sense of things in the internal world, achieving order through the act of articulation. For poets, unless something in the internal world has changed as a result of their work, nothing has been accomplished. The businessman, on the other hand, delights in making sense of the external world. For businessmen, unless something in the external world has changed as a result of his—actions a sale is made or a merger consummated—nothing has been accomplished. But for both, creativity is a means of finding order, controlling chaos. Both draw their waters out of the same well.
The agent for this work, of course, is the imagination. Poetry gets a lot of attention for its creativity—it is called one of the “creative arts.” But people not in business often miss the point that business is also a creative art. Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream was certainly a creative act for Ben and Jerry. A new company, a new product, even a solution to a mundane problem requires an idea. And an idea is an act of the imagination. The imagination is at work not just in poetry and business, but in all human endeavors. And wherever the imagination is at work, it takes the language with it. Surgeons feel for “landmarks” on their patient’s skin before making the incision. Botanists in their studies write of “senile grasses.” Watching scientists at this metaphoric work, bending old language to new needs, makes me think that poetry differs from science not in claiming language as its special province but in claiming (like all the arts) the human spirit as its special province.
Poetry and business: Each can escape some of its limitations by answering to the other’s logic. They have much to gain from one another.
(I never did find the slip.)