Rhymes, Ruin, and Ridicule: The Secret Lives of Poets

The Ultimate Freelance Hustle:

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• Samuel Johnson once noted that John Milton sold the copyright to Paradise Lost for five pounds—roughly equivalent to a decent dinner and a tank of gas today—proving that no matter how genius your epic verse is, corporate publishers have been lowballing writers since the seventeenth century.
  
  

  • The Ego Check: 

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  • Dorothy Parker famously dismantled the theatrical and poetic pretense of her era with razor-sharp brevity, once writing of a famously flowery contemporary, "The guards want to know if we'll let her in—she's brought her own ivy."
    
    

  • The Critique of Pure Despair:

    Lord Byron once reviewed a collection by his rival Robert Southey by noting that the verses were destined to be remembered as long as butcher's bills, dry cleaner receipts, and other forms of ephemeral paper.
    
    

  • The Pub Argument:

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     Dylan Thomas famously drank himself into a legendary stupor at the White Horse Tavern in New York, proving that the romantic tradition of the "cursed poet" usually just manifests as a terrible hangover and an unpaid tab.
    
    

  • The Over-Committed Romantic:

     Percy Bysshe Shelley once spent an afternoon writing love poetry on the side of a public bus using a stick of charcoal, completely oblivious to the fact that his audience was mostly unimpressed commuters just trying to get across London.
    
    

  • The Modern Critique of Inspiration:

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    Writing poetry is ninety percent staring blankly at a blinking cursor while questioning every life choice that led you to care about the exact placement of a comma, and ten percent frantically typing a metaphor at 3:00 AM because your brain refuses to let you sleep until it finds a rhyme for "window."
    
    
    
  What kind of poetic banter or historical writer roast are you in the mood for next?