Poets aren't very useful Because they aren't consumeful or very produceful.

In Nash’s characteristically comic, deliberately “incorrect” diction, the couplet satirizes a utilitarian view of human worth. By inventing clunky pseudo-words like “consumeful” and “produceful,” he mimics the language of economic productivity and consumer culture, implying that such metrics are themselves absurd when applied to art. The joke lands on two levels: poets are deemed “not useful” by a society that prizes measurable output, yet the poem’s wit demonstrates a different kind of value—pleasure, insight, and linguistic play. Nash thus defends poetry indirectly, by showing how it resists being reduced to market logic.