Poems Don't Pay

[poliphilo]

Writing about Robert Lowell and how his work has fallen out of fashion, Max Liu suggests that "it’s not always easy to feel sympathy for an artist with a trust fund and whose family have their own graveyard." Really?  Seems a bit specious to me. Do we chose our writers by caste? Byron and Tolstoy were aristocrats too and it doesn't seen to have affected their popularity.

No-one- with the possible exception of Alfred Tennyson- ever made a living from poetry alone. Poetry isn't a career or a profession. It doesn't pay. And almost every famous poet you care to name either had a private income, rich patrons or a day job.  T.S Eliot was a publisher, Philip Larkin a librarian, Stevie Smith a secretary, Robert Graves a popular novelist. Wallace Stevens was so much the successful businessman that his colleagues didn't always know that he was famous for something else.

Lowell's inherited money freed him from the grind of the nine to five but it didn't guarantee him an easy life...

Comments

[matrixmann]

Maybe that's what seems so strange to me seeing people desperately thinking they can all make it to make a steady income by their arts or the other things they deliver. Arts have always been an "unprofitable job", it's always been either you're a worker to somebody wealthy for his private entertainment or you've gotta do your arts beside your normal job - or you just live like a hobo, from day to day and your home's where you can put up a sleeping niché.
At least, if you try to be your own marketer while being the artist too, then it's like "What the fuck? What do you expect?" - it's not like you're the center of the world, everyone must look at you.
So, that's why I don't get it. Needless to say, if you got a big sponsor, then you've also got to do the art that he wants, not which you would want - and, if you've made it into that hamsterwheel, there's no real going back to another job life. If you haven't worked in the normal circle for a while, you get regarded like you haven't done anything at all.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Very true.

Once you're on the wheel there's no getting off- and you have to keep on turning out the product even if the inspiration fails.