Necessity

A TV commercial wants me to buy gold, another one offers me a full pound of Morgan Silver Dollars if I hand over a pile of cash. Poets are rarely rich nowadays. Back when, poets were moody and secretly gay people wore smoking jackets or puffy clouds of crinoline. You could tell they were hoy polloi, and regular folks assumed that only those that did not need to work wrote stuff. Poetry nowadays might get you some gold, but probably not enough for a tooth filling or two - maybe.