Patrick Greaney: Untimely Beggar. Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London 2008.

• Kirk Wetters

It is impossible to conceive the reality of poverty without taking recourse to a metaphorical- representational construct. Especially in ideas like “the poor in spirit” or “impoverished language,” the metaphorical element is unmistakable. Such conceptions generate uncertainty as to what we actually mean by poverty, and this fundamental ambiguity tends – paradoxically or ironically or unwittingly – in the direction of richness and surplus. Poverty is a “rich” metaphor, but at the same time every metaphorical usage is uncomfortable insofar as it seems to come at the expense of “real” poverty. This tension, arguably, is what has made poverty so productive in literary, theological and political traditions. Patrick Greaney’s “Untimely Beggar” unfolds this tension within European modernist poetics, which for him represents a limit case for the more general problem of poverty and representation, which permits insights that have escaped other discourses.

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