Business Poetry 101

But The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America is only a romantic inspirational message packaged as applied poetics and corporate analysis.

What would it mean to apply poetry to one's life? Don't look to Whyte for an answer; he misunderstands the enterprise. Instead of using his life to illustrate a poetic sensibility, he uses pieces of poetry to illustrate his philosophy of life, which, though often wise, occasionally turns ridiculous. Basho and Byron, for example, did apply poetry to their lives, with quite dissimilar effects but a comparable surrender to an aesthetic vision. Whyte, however, comes to poems as an accomplished workshop facilitator with a prepared agenda. But poems are not agenda points, they are not useful tools; they are a thing in themselves and applicable only on their own terms. That is how, as Whyte correctly notes yet fails to comprehend, poetry differs from religious dogma: the true poem is able to "speak across time to everyone no matter their world view," precisely because it contains its own independent logic that does not require belief from the reader nor does it impart a belief system. Think of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, the polarities of American poetry, who yet arose from the same culture, at the same time, and it's clear that there is no consistent and universal well of poetic truth waiting to be taught and applied to contemporary problems.

Though he doesn't describe the process, Whyte came to his beliefs about a way of living and working that honors the soul by some other route than the mythopoetic interpretation of great poetry. The great poets, just like the gods on Olympus, contradict each other incessantly. Whyte picks and chooses the quotations to support his sermon and not dismay his congregation: Beowulf the hero who descends into the lower world to dispatch the mother of all fears, but not Allan Ginsberg wandering through the New York subways crying his Howl; the spiritual insight of Rainer Maria Rilke but not the bureaucratic terror of Kafka.

At most points Whyte's analysis of corporate economics is only as deep as a cartoon. He quotes John Sculley, the one-time CEO of Apple Computers, describing the new corporate contract as, "we'll offer you an opportunity to express yourself and grow, if you promise to leash yourself to our dream, at least for a while." But he doesn't explore the strange ambiguities of this thought. Who is "our" when everything in the corporation, including Sculley, is quickly replaced? Now this is a contemporary myth-the corporate identity-existing over time irrespective of managers, employees, shareholders, national boundaries. Whyte proceeds to offer an insightful definition of a corporation: "a powerful personality without a solid identity," reminiscent of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's vision of the flight of a flock of starlings; and he links this in intriguing ways to chaos theory. Yet he backs away from this analysis, recommending, "Do not form a flock!" thereby undercutting the entire purpose of his book. What is a corporation but a flock? And employees but birds of a feather? This is an unpleasant truth to Americans gathered at the altar of individualism, and Whyte turns away from it.

Isn't there some work that is wrong and best left undone? For all his talk of the inner life, Whyte is rather taciturn about such moral choices, and avoids the question that Buddhism asks so relevantly about right livelihood. He quotes William Carlos Williams' wonderful lines: