Artists reject banks as source of income...

...it was ever thus.

 

Here's a quote from a circular that Ezra Pound and other artists put together in 1922 to try and stop T S Eliot having to work at a bank to earn a living. Note the figures quoted and realise how far we have come from then and how much greed has taken over: 

 

In order that T S Eliot may leave his work in Lloyd's Bank and devote his whole time to literature, we are raising a fund, to be 300 pounds annually; this being in our opinion the minimum possible for this purpose. Method, 10 pounds, fifty dollars...payable yearly by 30 subscribers.

 

This appeal went on, in a way you would expect from Pound, but was, ultimately, successful in getting Eliot out of banking and into full-time literature.

 

The world would have been poorer without Eliot's richness of poetry. Whilst, I'm sure he would have continued to write, to work in business and to write in private does not work. I've have tried it over the years and you have seen the manifestations. Try as I may (and I remember my long suffering wife putting up with me writing until the early hours, whilst she was in bed, or feeding our new born children, before I got up early in the morning and stumbled off to work) mammon has been the pull, in place of the muse.

 

But now; well the chance to share my writings and ramblings with you, if there is anyone listening? As well as the chance to celebrate the writers I grew up on. So let me end with some memorable lines from Eliot's Prufrock:

 

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table

 

Now if that isn't worth walking out of a bank for, then nothing is.