All this raises questions about poetry and our preconceptions of poets. As Robert Graves put it, "There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either."
"Ordinarily, poetry does seem to be the opposite of show business, and we probably just prefer our poets not to be celebrities in that particular way," says Don Share, Chicago-based editor of Poetry magazine and a poet himself. "It doesn't sit well with us, and it's very hard to explain that. Money is felt to be contaminating and to be antithetical to the values that we expect from poetry and literature and art."
But, he says, it's very unfair to resent poets and novelists who become rich, since pop stars, movie stars and even politicians are much wealthier. It's a good thing, in his view, if Million's Poet is providing counter-examples to the "stereotype of the starving artist, the poet in the garret".
That impression, he says, was fixed by the large number of great poets in history who happened to be very poor.
In the mid-19th Century, visitors flocked to the cottage of John Clare, to stare at the "peasant poet" who lived and worked in grinding poverty. There was bohemian poverty too, the type where a poet's last pennies were spent on absinthe or opium rather than bread. Charles Baudelaire was born to a wealthy family but squandered his inheritance and sank into debt. He said: "Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry." Arthur Rimbaud, living a scandalous life with his lover Paul Verlaine in London in 1872, passed his time in the Reading Room of the British Museum, to use their free heating and ink.
The associations between poverty and poetry did not disappear in the 20th Century......
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