Pope's Epistle to Bathurst and the Meaning of Finance.

This article reports that a large amount of recent scholarly and critical writing on the various relationships between economics and literature in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries has been based on the notion that financial innovations in the late seventeenth century precipitated anxiety about the form and nature of linguistic exchanges such as the writing and reading of poetry. It is opined that large literature surrounding eighteenth-century poetry and economics is founded on a false premise about the nature of language, literary language in particular, in relation to economy, and that it is precisely the way in which this premise is exposed as false in the Epistle to Bathurst that makes it such a good poem.