Having difficulty processing the pain of the worst global downturn since WWII? The poets offer wisdom for the madness of the times

By Rob Downey

Last winter I said a unique restructuring was afoot in global trade, that the wise will expect the cost of risk amelioration to rise in coming years. Also, “common sense” dictates we respect anew the internal credit management skills needed to control risk hence.

“Common sense” meant something different to Americans up to nearly the end of the last century than it does today. The great informal practitioners of pragmatism in U.S. history from Ben Franklin to Frankin D. Roosevelt to General David Petraeus took common sense to mean not a sense naturally common to all people, but the sense that particular people have of the common forces, basic truths, and practical facts operating in any given situation. “Common sense” used to mean a useful sense of the commonplace, not some generalized intuitive sense common to all.

Here we are in the summer of 2009, about halfway through the worst global economic downturn statistically since WWII. What does a pragmatist do? Who possesses the common sense to guide us through our workaday decision-making? Where is the fountainhead of skepticism, curiosity, close observation, and risk-willing heuristic attitudes to nourish us for the long slog still ahead?

I turn to poetry. You might consider it, too. Generally, poets are tougher than we are, more familiar with truth, more experienced with pain, more practical about loss, more sensible about common abruption, less inclined to lose their sense of sublime exaltation when life its own self merely occurs. I offer one example below; it should be enough to anchor the point secure.

One of the best business writers ever to comment upon truths relevant to industry, capitalism, trade and risk was a bed-ridden New England agoraphobe, a woman poet who owned nothing but a soul, directed nothing but penetrating observation, and risked nothing material save the mortal stuff of our most common sense every time she picked up her pen. She died prior to Custer in the late 19th century, never reached my age (56), and published seven poems in her life. She was Emily Dickinson.

She had this to say about financial bubbles of the type that grew from 1999 up until the market meltdown last September 15th: “Much madness is divinest sense, To a discerning eye. Much sense the starkest madness. ’Tis the majority, In this, as all prevails. Assent and you are sane — Demur — you’re straightway dangerous, And handled with a chain.”

And she offers us no easy solace for the great unwinding and profound period of reconsideration now underway in global business culture: “For each ecstatic instant, We must an anguish pay. In keen and quivering ratio, To the ecstasy. For each beloved hour, Sharp pittances of years, Bitter contested farthings, And coffers heaped with tears.”

It could take longer than we expect, she warned, we should fortify ourselves to stay on task and remain alert: “I many times thought peace had come, When peace was far away; As wrecked men deem they sight the land, At centre of the sea, And struggle slacker, but to prove, As hopelessly as I, How many the fictitious shores, Before the harbor lie.”

But Ms. Dickinson knew many may respond to hardship and loss with vigor renewed. “I can wade grief, Whole pools of it, — I 'm used to that. But the least push of joy, Breaks up my feet… (let God) Give balm to giants, And they'll wilt, like men. Give Himalaya — They 'll carry him!”

In fact, now absorbed with our bitter losses, Emily tells us to expect to discover a surprising ability to focus on the job before us: “While I was fearing it, it came, But came with less of fear, Because that fearing it so long, Had almost made it dear. There is a fitting, a dismay, A fitting, a despair. ’Tis harder knowing it is due, Than knowing it is here. The trying on the utmost, The morning it is new, Is terribler than wearing it, A whole existence through.”

What have we lost after all? And, for all that, do we not see at least some of our losses as the merest tuition of better wisdom going forward. If we have held onto Faith, Emily tells us, we have held on to the largest measure of our fortune: “To lose one’s faith surpasses, The loss of an estate, Because estates can be Replenished, — faith cannot. Inherited with life, Belief but once can be; Annihilate a single clause, And Being’s beggary.”

Make this summer of our business discontents, the summer you discover poetry. Make of Frost and Rilke, Wordsworth, cummings, Donne and Yeats a shadow Board of Directors. Emily should Chair.

(Rob Downey is one of the founding partners of International Risk Consultants, Inc. (IRC) www.irc-group.com – a globally-integrated trade-finance and credit insurance specialty brokerage, which serves as the operating member of ICBA for Mexico, Brazil, India, China and the U.S.)