There is a literal sense in which the figures of the poet and entrepreneur are fundamentally opposed. The Greek root of the former is a verb that means ‘to make’ – as several previous chapters have already mentioned, in my broader attempt to draw attention to poetry's material contexts and material conceptions of its production, as distinct from its circulation as a commodity. The word ‘entrepreneur’ is a much more recent, mid- eighteenth- century coinage even in French, before it shortly thereafter entered English usage. The Irish- French writer Richard Cantillon, known as the ‘Father of Political Economy’, first described the ‘entrepreneur’ in his Essay on the Nature of Trade in General (1755) as a figure who ‘carries’ or ‘bears’ financial risk, while Jean- Baptiste Say, in his Treatise on Political Economy (1800), supplements this with an emphasis on ‘undertaking’ a new enterprise.1 Whether we understand the French etymology with a focus on ‘carrying between’ or ‘undertaking’, there is a meaningful antipathy between a notion of poetry as ‘making’ and entrepreneurship as ‘taking’. This becomes important when considering the applicability of the latter term to the work of poets (or the work of most creative practitioners, I would argue). In many cases, this conceptual gap signifies a real division in practice, between the actual ‘making’ of poems and all the other stuff required to ‘take’ these goods to market.

As part of the book's final section on poetry's ‘new producers’, this chapter considers the influence of entrepreneurial culture on contemporary poetry. In the mode of many preceding chapters, the discussion is grounded in its attention to the rhetoric of entrepreneurship. Building particularly on the last chapter's conceptions of poetic work and labour, my simple argument is that this changing language has real consequences. Moreover, given the strong business connotations of entrepreneurship, I want to stress from the start that these consequences for contemporary poetry culture do not depend on the adoption or rejection of that language by individual poets. To some extent, this book's emphasis on the wider influence of new creative industries discourse culminates in the degree to which entrepreneurial values have become normalised and internalised – not only for those involved with poetry, but for all of us.