Who ever made money from poetry? For much of his career, TS Eliot needed his job as editor at Faber & Faber, even if his Selected Poems would eventually, over long years, sell hundreds of thousand of copies. Philip Larkin was not a librarian just because it suited his temperament: he had to pay the bills. In is lifetime Ted Hughes, the most famous poet of his generation, sold more copies of his children's tale The Iron Man than of any of his volumes of verse. It was only posthumously that his Birthday Letters became a huge commercial success. Perhaps only Alexander Pope ever became a rich man early in his life from the poetry that he wrote (and that was from translating Homer). "No man but a blockhead writes, except for money," said Dr Johnson. Poets are blockheads almost to a man and woman.

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Yet in their hearts, poets cannot help but think that the fizz and splutter of contemporaneity is besides the point. The only reputation that matters is posthumous. Death, makes the poet's reputation secure, or fails to do so. The poets competing for prizes every year would surely forsake any prize money for the sake of just one timelessly memorable poem to leave behind them.