Consumerism
Write about wanting things in a world built to keep you wanting.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about consumerism: sharp imagery, craft techniques, cliches to avoid, plus exercises and writing prompts in this free guide by Writory.
What this theme is
Consumerism in poetry is not really about shopping. It is about desire that has been manufactured for you, the strange grief of owning plenty and still feeling hollow, and the way objects promise a self they can never deliver. A good consumerism poem walks the aisle slowly. It notices the fluorescent hum, the mango flown five thousand miles, the slogan that rhymes better than most modern verse, and it asks who taught the speaker to want this, and what the wanting is standing in for.
The theme also carries a quiet double exposure: every purchase is a small autobiography. What a person buys, hoards, returns or cannot afford tells a story about loneliness, aspiration, class and love. When you write consumerism well, the trolley becomes a confession. The receipt becomes a poem-length list of everything the speaker hoped would fix them.
Why poets return to it
Poets choose this theme because it lets them write about the biggest forces in modern life through the smallest objects: a loyalty card, a delivery box on a doorstep, a phone that knows your size. It offers satire, but also tenderness, since almost everyone has bought something to feel less sad.
It is also a theme where wit and honesty can coexist, and readers reward that mix. The danger is smugness, so the strongest poems implicate the speaker instead of lecturing the reader.
Where it comes from
William Wordsworth got there early: his 1807 sonnet beginning 'The world is too much with us' complains that getting and spending has cost us our connection to nature, a line of argument poets have been sharpening ever since. In 1955 Allen Ginsberg wandered a Californian supermarket at night in a famous poem, imagining Walt Whitman among the shoppers and asking what America had become.
Later poets went further inside the language of retail itself. Harryette Mullen built playful, unsettling prose poems out of supermarket branding and advertising phrases, showing that the vocabulary of selling could be turned into the vocabulary of critique. Frank O'Hara, meanwhile, made the lunch-hour purchase a lyric occasion.
The elements that carry it
- Supermarket and mall imagery: aisles, trolleys, fluorescent light, freezer mist, the choreography of queues.
- Packaging and its afterlife: shrink wrap, boxes inside boxes, the bin bag waiting at the end of every purchase.
- The language of advertising, slogans, discounts and small print, borrowed and bent until its promises sound strange.
- Numbers as texture: prices, barcodes, loyalty points, interest rates, the arithmetic that shadows desire.
- One object charged with longing, the unworn dress, the gadget still in its box, standing in for what was really wanted.
Techniques that work
- Use the catalogue: a list of purchases, arranged with care, can build from comedy to heartbreak without a single line of commentary.
- Borrow ad language and let context corrode it, so a phrase like 'because you deserve it' turns sour inside a poem about debt or grief.
- Implicate the speaker. 'I bought' is braver and more interesting than 'people buy', and it keeps the poem from preaching.
- Follow one object past the till: its manufacture before, its landfill after. Widening the timeline turns satire into vision.
- End on an image of what money could not buy, letting the true hunger surface only in the final lines.
Mistakes to avoid
- Sermonizing about materialism in abstract nouns. Fix it by staying inside one shop, one purchase, one pair of hands.
- Easy irony that mocks shoppers from above. Put the speaker in the queue too, wallet out, wanting.
- Brand names sprinkled for edginess without doing any work. Every named product should carry emotional or class information.
- Ending on 'money can't buy happiness' or its cousins. Land on a specific unmet hunger instead: company, rest, being known.
An exercise
Find a real receipt, yours or a found one, and write a poem that moves through it item by item, letting each line reveal something about the day, the mood or the life behind the purchases, without ever stating a feeling directly.
A challenge
For five days, write two lines each day about one thing you almost bought and did not. On day six, weave the fragments into a single poem about the shape of your wanting.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem set in the returns queue of a large shop, where the speaker is returning something that cannot actually be returned.
Before you submit
- The poem stays grounded in particular objects and places, not general talk about society.
- Any advertising language is doing deliberate ironic or emotional work, not decorating.
- The speaker's own desire is visible and slightly exposed.
- The poem avoids a moral summary; images carry the judgement.
- The ending opens onto the unpurchasable thing rather than closing with a slogan of its own.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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