Yeah but a large chunk of his income would have come from his novel sales.
What about Allen Ginsburg?
AFAIK, he only wrote poetry, and he did live off the royalties and fees for readings for a large part of his life.
He’s got a piece in Love Is a Dog from Hell, I believe, where he epically goes off on people who exclusively write poetry. He probably did make enough from poetry to live off of, but he explicitly says that he does not do this - and doesn’t respect anyone who does.
I think Ted Hughes would be a good recent example. Ann Duffy, our current poet laureate would also qualify.
Although Shakespeare also acted, the evidence suggests that it was primarily his skill as a playwright that led to his financial success. It’s true that plays could be purchased very cheaply, but Shakespeare’s were the best.
Alexander Pope is usually considered the second Englishman, after Shakespeare, to support himself and achieve considerable financial success from his poetry. Much of this came from his translation of Homer, but I consider that a poetic translation is still poetry.
In the later part of his career, Longfellow supported himself, with great success, just from his writings, which were primarily poetry and poetic translations. Longfellow had probably the most successful career that a poet has ever had in the United States.
Bob Dylan. Man can’t sing worth a damn, but his words hold meaning and truths.
Teddy Roosevelt was a big fan and arranged for Robinson to get a position with the New York Customs Office in which he had to do very little so he had time and money (and a desk) for writing. I think that only lasted about four years though, and Robinson did spend most of his career (before and after that job) as a working poet. Three Pulitzer Prizes won in the 1920s suggest he was in the right line of work.
Dylan is a stunning, jaw-droppingly wondering lyricist. Shakespeare is a major playwright who has lasted for centuries. Dr. Seuss may be the most successful pre-reader writer ever.
But though they worked in poetry, they are not poets, did not make their living as poets, and are not thought of primarily as poets. Calling them poets doesn’t even rise to the level of nitpicking. If you include all lyricists, playwrights, and children’s book writers who used poetry as poets, then the question stops having any meaning. Why would anybody bother to ask it if there are literally thousands of obvious examples? It’s only if you define poet as poet that the question becomes interesting.
Pope is usually considered the first, the distinction being made between poetry and drama, which of course is how Shakespeare earned his keep.
Pope published his translation of the Iliad by subscription and was hugely successful. As he later put it,
But thanks to Homer since I live and thrive
Indebted to no prince or peer alive.
True on Dylan, who is primarily a performer. (I might cavil on the lyricist and poet Bernie Taupin, who performs only secondarily and has made his living from his poetic writings.) True on Seuss, who was primarily an artist. But if you ask anyone who were the great poets of the English language, Shakespeare will always be among the first names mentioned.
Yeah, and I think 154 sonnets and two short epics are sufficient to qualify him as a poet in any case. If he’d never written a word for the stage, the average person in the street might never have heard of him, but people who knew anything about Elizabethan poetry certainly would. (This doesn’t, of course, change the fact that he would have been unlikely to be able to support himself from poetry alone.)
You two need to have read through the entire thread. My comment wasn’t about whether Shakespeare was a poet. It was a reply to this post.
Many plays have been written in verse, down to the present day. That doesn’t make the writers poets. Shakespeare didn’t make his living as a poet either. He shouldn’t even be mentioned. That’s the only point I’m making.
The suggestion that Shakespeare was not a poet, or that his status as a poet is dependent on his sonnets and a couple of all-but-forgotten longer poems, strikes me as entirely ludicrous. However, I suppose it really comes down to a matter of definitions and what the OP is looking for.
First, what is meant by a “poet”? I understand a poet to be someone who writes poetry. The OP may have a narrower definition in mind. Are Shakespeare’s plays excluded, since they are also dramatic works? A song is a poem that is sung; is a lyricist a poet? Hallmark employs people to write verse for its greeting cards; do they qualify? What about translators of poetical works? Pope made most of his money from translating Homer, which required him to come up with new versification in English, but there were existing poems to work from. What about writers of doggerel? Would Francesco Marciuliano sneak in with his book of cat poetry, I Could Pee on This? (Well, no, he wouldn’t, because he has other sources of income, but let’s assume he is surviving just on his verse.) Or are we only talking about poets who have achieved critical distinction?
Second, how strictly are we considering the requirement that the poet’s living be made only from poetry? Pretty much all poets have at least some non-poetic writings. Is Longfellow excluded because he wrote prose as well as his more remunerative poetry? Is Ginsberg excluded because he got money from reciting as well as writing his poetry? Shakespeare probably does fail on this point; his writings likely were the bulk of his income, but he was an actor as well.
He died poor enough that lots of his furniture was taken from his home (that I just visited), but he certainly did make his living from poetry. He worked for about a year as a journalist after leaving school, but once he became a poet he lived entirely off that (poetry readings still count as living off poetry, I would have thought).
A lot of poets in the past lived off their poetry, like John Milton, for example. He did do other things too, political work mostly, but ISTM that he made most of his money from poetry. Died in penury but didn’t have to get an ordinary paying job at least, and “in penury” still enabled him to have a sizeable house, servants etc.
These days I think even very successful poets like Carol Ann Duffy make at least some of their money from work that is poetry-related but not the actual writing or performing of poetry: teaching, editting, reviewing, etc. So she might or might not count.