If there’s no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money, said Robert Graves in a speech to the London School of Economics in 1963. But there has always been an inescapable link between the two, says Janice Warman
Money and its hold on the human race run through literature like the veins through marble. Or a person.
‘A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of,’ said Jane Austen; ‘The man who is insensible to the power money brings with it must be a dolt,’ wrote Anthony Trollope.
Poetry has always been the poor relation of the literary family, catching the scraps from the dinner table. Ask any poet. ‘If you want to write poetry you must earn a living some other way,’ said T.S. Eliot, who famously worked for Lloyds Bank for most of his life; and Auden remarked, ‘It’s a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art that he can by practising it.’ Or as the LSE-educated poet Basil Bunting wrote:
Poetry? It’s a hobby.
I run model trains.
Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.
It’s not work. You don’t sweat.
Nobody pays for it.
You could advertise soap.
Many writers have done just that. Fay Weldon and Justin Cartwright are just two who began their working lives in advertising; the former famously told us to ‘Go to work on an egg’ and Cartwright, now known for his lyrical prose, told me recently that in his Soho days he was the author of the line ‘Prime Pal [presumably despite the fact that it was so delicious] is for dogs.’ You couldn’t get much further from poetry.
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