Wealth & Money Quote by W. H. Auden

Auden lands the punch with an accountant’s clarity: the market rewards the story of art more reliably than the labor of making it. The line is “sad” not because poets are poor - that’s old news - but because the economy of attention has learned to monetize the commentary layer: lectures, essays, interviews, festivals, grants, the whole interpretive superstructure that swells around a slim volume of verse. Poetry becomes a content source, and the poet, if he wants to eat, is nudged into becoming his own publicist and theorist.

The subtext is sharper than a complaint about low royalties. Auden is diagnosing a cultural preference for legibility. Talking about art flatters the audience’s sense of access; it turns the private, resistant experience of a poem into a social object that can be paraphrased, quoted, taught, and sold. Practicing it, by contrast, is slow, often silent, and indifferent to the metrics that commerce understands. In a culture anxious for “explainers,” the poet’s most bankable skill becomes interpretation - sometimes of his own work, sometimes of “the creative process” as a lifestyle.

Context matters: Auden watched modernism move from insurgency to institution, from little magazines to universities and patronage. The poem’s prestige rose even as its market shrank, creating a paradox where cultural capital doesn’t translate into cash unless it’s converted into speech. Auden’s real target is that conversion: when the artist’s survival depends on narrating the work, the narration starts to tug at what gets made.