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: 

    
    
  • 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."
    
    
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