It was once said that Portugal was a land of poets, a statement that objectively highlighted the fact that Portugal was not a land of many other arts or professions perhaps more highly valued on the international stock market of merit.
But Portugal has always been, and continues to be, a land of people obsessed with money, and exceedingly anxious about the money they do not have and see in the hands of others, to whom, out of structural envy, they are unwilling to concede any merit.
The historical relationship of Portuguese poets with money, then, is fertile ground for all sorts of stories and anecdotes marked by misery, greed, humiliation, envy, and repeated misunderstandings.
From the medieval poets who coveted a pension or alms from a noble protector, to the shirtless Camões for whom a slave begged for sustenance, continuing through the romantics who died of consumption and lack of dinner, landing on Pessoa, who wrote about commerce but counted his loose change at the wine table—all of them lived and wrote under the sign of a lack of money, even when they left behind poems that today would be worth millions.
It is against this backdrop that the phrase “money is a kind of poetry,” by the American poet Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)—paradoxical at first glance—suggests that money is not merely a neutral economic mechanism, but a symbolic system with its own expressive force.
Wallace Stevens is one of the most unique figures in 20th-century American poetry. Part of the modernist movement and a contemporary of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams, he is distinguished by his dense, philosophical, and musical writing, frequently centered on the relationship between imagination and reality.
There is, however, a biographical trait that makes him even more fascinating: throughout his life, Stevens worked as a top executive at an insurance company, the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he became vice president.
He refused to become a university professor or live exclusively off literature, maintaining the disciplined routine of the corporate world while writing some of the most influential poems of his generation. This coexistence of business and imagination gives special meaning to his famous adage: “Money is a kind of poetry.”
Stevens, accustomed to dealing daily with contracts, risks, premiums, and claims, deeply understood that money operates as a language: it assigns value, establishes relationships, guides behaviors, creates expectations, and even shapes identities. Like poetry, money condenses meaning into a tiny space; like poetry, it requires interpretation; like poetry, it moves desire and triggers action.
Stevens’s adage can, therefore, be viewed from several angles.
First, in an aesthetic sense: money is poetry because it organizes itself into symbols that transcend its materiality.
Second, in an anthropological sense: money produces narratives. It tells stories about who has it, who doesn’t, who loses, who wins; it reveals destinies, ambitions, frustrations, and conquests.
Third, in a moral and philosophical sense: by comparing it to poetry, Stevens was perhaps not idealizing money, but reminding us that it possesses the same potential for ambiguity as a good poem.
A poetic text can be sublime or trivial, liberating or oppressive, generous or cruel, and money can also distort reality or distance humanity from what is essential.
Wallace Stevens’s adage thus functions as a warning: we should read money with the same critical attention with which we read a poem, because poetic imagination is not the enemy of economic discipline; it can coexist with it and even be fueled by that tension.
In short, saying that money is a kind of poetry might help us recognize that both are human constructs designed to give shape to what we desire and what we fear. Ultimately, both are ways of organizing the world—and ways of dreaming it.
Paulo Fidalgo
CEO of Marketividade
