What Poetry Brings to Business

For some 15 years, roughly 1996 to 2010, poet David Whyte was the missionary of poetry to business. And he was a very specific kind of missionary for poetry, as the subtitle of his book The Heart Aroused suggests: “Poetry and the Preservation of the Corporate Soul in America.” For Whyte, poetry could be not only a compass and guide for business but also something more than that, perhaps even a way to do business or preserve its soul.

In 2010, Clare Morgan, director of the graduate writing center at the university of Oxford, published What Poetry Brings to Business, coauthored with Kirsten Lange and Ted Buswick of the Boston Consulting Group. Morgan’s book doesn’t actually challenge Whyte’s for preeminence; in fact, she doesn’t even mention him or The Heart Aroused. She’s English and he’s Welsh; in might be one of those intra-Britain rivalry things (although Whyte moved to America).

To continue reading, please see my post today at TweetSpeak Poetry.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.