As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be,
poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game.—T.S. Eliot. The Use of Criticism (1933)
When you get old, and you’ve written poetry for most of your life, you see how inconsequential it has all been, and then the thought occurs, has this been a huge waste of time? Of course it hasn't, it's been your life, it's what helped make you what you are. You understood life through writing and reading poetry, you transformed a vale of tears into a vale of soul making, as Keats suggested. But while some poets write for the love of writing there are very few real poets, even someone who is old and has published or written their poems for many years may be inauthentic, not true to themselves, pretending to be something they aren't. A real poet is hard to find. For the few, poetry is like a religion (as Matthew Arnold said), but Arnold omitted saying that like religion poetry can be full of false hope, there is no grace, no heaven, and you’re on your own. It's a mug's game. If you're a real poet you question everything, you’re not someone who writes a few poems and, without shame or depth, announces that they are a poet. A poet is someone who defines their inner being as being a poet, not someone who takes a few creative writing courses and decides that they are a poet; you must be born a poet or transformed into being a poet by the events of your life; for a real poet, poetry defines your life, it is a presence in your life, it has an importance that is a part of one’s very existence.
