ve starved me and driven me dead.
Friends, do you hear? What I want is bread.
[Footnote: _The Young Poet_.]

Through the thin veneer of the fictitious poet in Joaquin Miller's
_Ina_, the author himself appears, raving,

A poet! a poet forsooth! Fool! hungry fool!
Would you know what it means to be a poet?
It is to want a friend, to want a home,
A country, money,--aye, to want a meal.
[Footnote: See also John Savage, _He Writes for Bread_.]

But in autobiographical verse, the tone changes, and the poet refuses to
pose as a candidate for charity. Rather, he parades an ostentatious
horror of filthy lucre, only paralleled by his distaste for food. Mrs.
Browning boasts,

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,
Ye