The Devil himself scarce trusts his patented
Gold-making art to any who makes rhymes,
But culls his Faustus from philosophers
And not from poets.
[Footnote: Aurora Leigh.]
A poet who can make ends meet is practically convicted of being no true artist. Shakespeare is so solitary an exception to this rule, that his mercenary aspect is a pure absurdity to his comrades, as Edwin Arlington Robinson conceives of them. [Footnote: See Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford.] In the eighteenth century indifference to remuneration was not so marked, and in poetic epistles, forgers of the couplet sometimes concerned themselves over the returns, [Footnote: See Advice to Mr. Pope, John Hughes; Economy, The Poet and the Dun, Shenstone.] but since the romantic movement began, such thought has been held unworthy. [Footnote: See To a Poet Abandoning His Art, Barry Cornwall; and Poets and Poets, T. E. Browne. On the other hand, see Sebastian Evans, Religio Poetae.] In fact, even in these days, we are comparatively safe from a poet's strike.
Usually the poet declares that as for himself, he is indifferent to his financial condition. Praed speaks fairly for his brethren, when in A Ballad Teaching How Poetry Is Best Paid For, he represents their terms as very easy to meet. Even the melancholy Bowles takes on this subject, for once, a cheerful attitude, telling his visionary boy,
Nor fear, if grim before thine eyes
Pale worldly want, a spectre lowers;
What is a world of vanities
To a world as fair as ours?
In the same spirit Burns belittles his poverty, saying, in An Epistle to Davie, Fellow Poet:
To lie in kilns and barns at e'en
When bones are crazed, and blind is thin
Is doubtless great distress,
Yet then content would make us blest.
Shelley, too, eschews wealth, declaring, in Epipsychidion,
Our simple life wants little, and true taste
Hires not the pale drudge luxury to waste
The scene it would adorn.
Later poetry is likely to take an even exuberant attitude toward poverty. [Footnote: See especially verse on the Mermaid group, as Tales of the Mermaid Inn, Alfred Noyes. See also Josephine Preston Peabody, The Golden Shoes; Richard Le Gallienne, Faery Gold; J. G. Saxe, The Poet to his Garret; W. W. Gibson, The Empty Purse; C. G. Halpine, To a Wealthy Amateur Critic; Simon Kerl, Ode to Debt, A Leaf of Autobiography; Thomas Gordon Hake, The Poet's Feast; Dana Burnet, In a Garret; Henry Aylett Sampson, Stephen Phillips Bankrupt.] The poet's wealth of song is so great that he leaves coin to those who wish it. Indeed he often has a superstitious fear of wealth, lest it take away his delight in song. In Markham's The Shoes of Happiness, only the poet who is too poor to buy shoes possesses the secret of joy. With a touching trust in providence, another poet cries,
Starving, still I smile,
Laugh at want and wrong,
He is fed and clothed
To whom God giveth song.
[Footnote: Anne Reeve Aldrich, A Crowned Poet.]