This book has often foregrounded poetry's competitive side. The ‘business’ of poetry appears to pit poets and publishers against one another in unavoidable ways. The nature of publishing contracts, prizes, funding, jobs, academic institutions, and residencies all seems to necessitate an unequal distribution of resources and opportunities, whose value is determined through competition. For many, this is rationalised by a split- logic discussed in the final section of this book. On the one hand, these structures are regarded as separate from the writing itself, which therefore retains its independence. On the other hand, they’re also said to have a positive influence on the work. Announcing the results of the 2017 Mick Imlah Poetry Prize, Alan Jenkins neatly expresses this incongruity in his assertion: ‘Art is not a competition; but a competition may encourage art, and reward it.’ By such logic, neither the prospect nor the consequences of receiving (in this case) £3,000 for a single poem can ever pierce the creative bubble of its making. This doublethink serves the writer too, who can claim, like the novelist Nadine Gordimer, upon winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991: ‘I never thought about the prize when I wrote. Writing is not a horse race.’ In the context of publishing, these distinctions are analogous to the one in Marx's image of Milton, which I’ve discussed a few times. Milton's pure ‘expression of his own nature’ while writing Paradise Lost is split from his later position as a ‘dealer in a commodity’ when selling the manuscript.In either case, writing's autonomy is rationalised by separating the moment of writing from the moment in which its value is inscribed.

While these contests might seem historically inextricable – poetry competitions and prizes were a key feature of ancient Greek culture, after all – this book is my attempt to understand poetry's changing dynamics in a period when competition has become a more general condition of life under neoliberalism.