The book’s coda addresses an economic and cultural shift in national focus from production toward consumption that took place in response to the theory that the Depression was a “crisis of underconsumption.” According to this logic, capitalism could best be salvaged by stimulating consumer buying power, and thus by bolstering demand for the emerging commodities associated with what Rita Barnard has called the “culture of abundance.” This book thus concludes by proposing that a Depression-era gravitational shift from a producerist model associated with Fordist industrialism toward the mass consumption that would define the postwar period was paralleled by a displacement of the notion of the writer (or poet) as a producer toward one of the writer (or poet) as consumer. This poetics of mass consumerism can be seen in its offing in the Depression-era work of George Oppen and Mina Loy, but it reaches its fullest expression in the postwar poetry of John Ashbery, as well as the work of more recent poets such as Robert Fitterman and Juliana Spahr.

This chapter examines a lesser-studied element of Wallace’s intertextual engagement: his engagements with poets, poetry and poetics. Although he once claimed that he was “not talented enough” to be a poet, Wallace’s writing was deeply immersed in and often concerned with questions to do with the nature of poetry and the figure of the poet. Some of his titles refer or allude to specific poems – from “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” (George Berkeley) to The Pale King (John Keats) – while other texts, such as the short story “Here and There,” use the idea of poetry to explore the relationship between language and experience, expression and form. In his longer works, too, Wallace uses particular poets in interesting (often entertaining) ways – W. H. Auden in The Broom of the System, for example, and Emily Dickinson in Infinite Jest. In interviews and essays, Wallace declared an interest in a wide range of poets, from W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore and Philip Larkin to Bill Knott and Stephen Dobyn. Taken together, these and further examples suggest that a more detailed account of Wallace’s writing on and about poetry will fill a particular gap in the understandings of his work.