It seems that even the most successful poets also do professional activities other than writing poetry - teaching, for example, or writing novels/plays/other literature in addition to poetry. So, in all of history, has any poet ever made their living only from poetry?
Well - Byron was pretty much a superstar celebrity in his day (1788 – 1824). He made and lost several fortunes and lived a life that makes today’s celebrities look pretty tame by comparison.
Byron did pretty well off it. He had some inherited money, but his poetry sold so well that he could probably have lived off his royalties quite comfortably.
Bards in traditional societies presumably lived of their poetry.
I suspect there were a number of poets who eventually made enough money from their poetry that they could have lived off it (people like Longfellow, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Frost, or less highly regarded, now mostly forgotten poets like Edgar Guest spring to mind as possibilities); but I couldn’t swear to it that they didn’t have other sources of funds besides what they earned from their poetry.
If you include readings and public appearances I think Dylan Thomas did pretty well, for example. Otherwise, no.
Prolly Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. They both came from the upper upper middle class, that can rest in moderate comfort without working if need be, and I never heard of them doing much else.
Kipling, if you allow fiction writing in addition. His writings may have brought the income in, but it was his poetry that made his name at the beginning in order to sell his works.
Shakespeare, of course. His plays are in verse (except for a few brief prose passages), and he made his living from the writing of them. The same can probably said about many of the other playwrights of the era, although some had other sources of income.
Would Eminem count as a poet? He does stuff that rhymes and scans…
Rod McKuen was probably a millionaire just from his poetry. He did other things as well, but there are few people who don’t do more than one thing in life. I’m not sure how you judge whether poets could have lived off their poetry alone. But here are a few names.
E. E. Cummings. Robert Frost, though he also was a lifelong professor. Edna St. Vincent Millay. Amy Lowell, though it helped that she came from a wealthy family. Edwin Arlington Robinson. Stephen Vincent Benét. Man, the 20s were a Golden Age for poetry, weren’t they?
W. H. Auden was mostly a poet, although he had a well-rounded career. Marianne Moore. Theodore Roethke. Gwendolyn Brooks.
Delmore Schwartz was fiercely proud that he lived solely off his poetry, but he was a hopeless alcoholic who traded poetry for liquor and lived one step above homelessness.
Poetry magazine is very well off these days…
Baxter Black, the cowboy poet, said Yevgeny Yevtushenko is the only poet who makes a living at it.
Allen Ginsberg primarily supported himself by his poetry from the 60s onward.
I’ve purchased every collection Billy Collins ever published. He teaches, but I think he could live on the sale of his words.
Murray Lachlan Young famously was given a £1 million contract by EMI for a deal to record his poetry. Though as you can hear, his poetry of often straddled the line between other kinds of entertainment such as comedy and music:
Lyn Lifshin today makes her income from poetry; her husband worked at GE when she was starting out, but with a combination of selling her chapbooks and teaching poetry, she supports herself. It helps that she is incredibly prolific and sends her poems everywhere; there are very few literary magazines that haven’t published her work.
I’d dispute Shakespeare – playwrights in his day got paid a pittance. This is why the immensely prolific Thomas Dekker spent years in debtors’ prison. Shakespeare did make a small fortune in the theater, but that was because he was a shareholder in a successful theater company (and a pretty smart investor in his own right). Of course, you could make a good case that his company was successful because they had Shakespeare to write plays for them, but he wasn’t making most of his money directly from writing plays.
Of course people who write song lyrics, which are simply poems to be set to music, can make a lot of money, and some only write lyrics, not music. This is actually probably by far the most important and effective way that people monetize poetic talent these days. Some will write lyrics to piece of music they are given, others work in close collaboration with a musician, such that it is impossible to say whether music or lyrics came first, but there are also those such as Oscar Hammerstein and Bernie Taupin who would simply write a poem of a suitable and send it to their collaborator (Richard Rogers and Elton John, respectively) to be set to music.
That seems a bit like saying that authors do not make money from their books because publishers have to sell their books for them. Or maybe that Steve Jobs did not make any money from running Apple because his annual salary was just $1. Of course Shakespeare’s company was successful largely because they had Shakespeare to write for them.
Even so, the normal definitions of “poet” makes it a separate category from “lyricist”. It’s hard to think of any real world setting in which the two are lumped together.
But the OP is asking whether anyone has ever made a living from poetry alone, without indulging in other professional activities. Shakespeare was a working actor for most of his professional life, as well as a businessman, and it’s largely through the latter activity that he made his money.