Give a man a twitter account and he thinks he's Edward R Murrow

Recently there have been a number of outrages against public decency that have broken as stories or been heavily promoted by celebrity Twitterers: these include Jan Moir being rude about a dead gay singer; Carter-Ruck and Trafigura injuncting the Guardian; and the Scottish Sunday Express intruding on Dunblane.

What's curious is that the voices promoting these issues are not in the main political reporters, politicians, or even political bloggers. Instead the likes of Graham Linehan (instrumental in the Dunblane issue), Stephen Fry (credited with publicising Trafigura), and Charlie Brooker (promoting a variety of liberal causes from drug policy to being nice to Stephen Gately) are comedy writers and/or presenters. The tone is summed up by this tweet from Brooker: "RT @arusbridger: Thx to Twitter/all tweeters for fantastic support over past 16 hours! Great victory for free speech. #trafigura #guardian". The Guardian makes use of Twitter for advertising as well as campaigning so this is a happy collision of both.

The JCPR Twitter Index attempts to rank Twitter account holders based on retweets and other measures as well as the number of followers. The top 10 British Twitterers as of 30 Oct are:

1 Jonathan Ross 438,099 followers
2 Fry 921,760
3 Linehan 33,458
4 Downing Street 1,523,922
5 Jason Bradbury (The Gadget Show) 39,913
6 Philip Schofield
7 Alan Davies
8 Russell Brand
9 Coldplay
10 Phil Jupitus

Brooker was further down, 51st of the British, but with 83,856 followers was more popular than many above him. He does retweet a lot, though.

In contrast, when The Independent asked "Who are the most influential bloggers on Twitter?" on 3 Aug 2009, the top 3 were Guido Fawkes (notorious right-libertarian blogger) (as of 30 Oct, he has 5672 followers), Jon Snow (Channel 4 newscaster of somewhat liberal persuasion) (8800 followers), and Iain Dale (mainstream Conservative) (6411 followers). None of them feature in Twitter Index's list. So it's clear that (with the uncertain exception of Downing Street) it is comics, not politicans or political writers, who are getting their message across on Twitter.

While Fry is in the popular imagination something of a polymath, with plentiful books (fiction and non-fiction), numerous factual TV shows, newspaper columns, dramatic acting, as well as being funny, the others have less obvious claim to be moral guardians. Linehan has written or co-written some amusing TV comedy (working on Father Ted, Big Train, Black Books, the IT Crowd, and others).

Brooker's story is perhaps the most interesting example of a man pushed to fame by his ability to spout opinions in easy to package doses. He started off as a video-game journalist before progressing to mock bad TV online and in the Guardian. Eventually he progressed to an all purpose ranter, mocking the obsession with Twitter (1, 2), attacking the mob mentality of the outraged who rush off to complain about everything they see or hear, saying "I hate offended people", and that he hates opinions. The self-contradiction is almost-certainly tongue in cheek.

In October 2008 he penned a column about how maybe it's not so good to mock celebrities, after reading some of the megabytes of hate-filled email he gets from wannabe comedians seeking his seal of approval: "Perhaps I'm mellowing in my old age, or perhaps I've grown 15% more human, but kicking real people when they're down doesn't really activate my chuckle cells." A few weeks before he'd talked about his spiritual emptiness, suggesting a kind of personal crisis.

Since then his columns have been less sneery, and Brooker's career has had its ups and downs: You Have Been Watching, a Channel 4 panel game in which he sneered at TV got mixed reviews, while Newswipe in which he reported more seriously on TV news coverage was widely appreciated as one of the few TV programs to take television seriously. His tweets and columns reflect a growing interest in the reporting of science, as well as the more obvious expressions of outrage (Trafigura, Moir).

Will the growth of the comic-turned-twitter-politician be the start of a new popular movement? Fry, being intelligent, sees the risks and has expressed sympathy for Moir in the witchhunt she suffered:

I feel sorry for her because I know just what it is like to make a monumental ass of oneself and how hard it is to find the road back. I know all too well what it is like to be inebriated, as Disraeli put it, by the exuberance of my own verbosity.

He continued musing on his own Twitter popularity:

And what am I after all? What right have I to wield this kind of influence? A question people have been asking about journalists for years, but which they have every right to ask about me too. I don't know what business I have wielding influence either. This whole thing has just grown up around me and now I cannot help wondering if, despite my preference for turd-sucking over politics, I have found myself in a new Fifth Estate political assembly, willy-nilly hailed as some sort of tribune by friendly people on one side and being yelled at by unfriendly people on the other. I am not cut out for the hurly-burly of adversarial politics. I am not qualified to represent anyone nor, I cannot repeat often enough, do I wish to. So I should shut up.

Fry continued for another 1000 words.

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ADDENDUM: Further controversy has accompanied Fry's Twitterings (Guardian 2009/10/31, 2009/11/02). A twitterer called brumplum called Fry's postings boring, and Fry announced his retirement: "You've convinced me. I'm obviously not good enough. I retire from Twitter henceforward. Bye everyone." Large number of Fry-followers attacked brumplum (some names removed):

@brumplum IS SO BORING HE FUCKS SHEEP @brumplum ur soo gonan be fucking sorry for callin my fav celeb boring u fukin turded faceless arsole

@brumplum You sound like a prick and I only half read your Twitter.

@brumplum r u the reason that stephen fry is thinking of leaving Twitter?Shame on u -he's a national treasure with a kind soul y b so nasty?

@brumplum you truly are a nasty little individual.

I can think of fewer things worse really. Who the fuck is @brumplum to upset Twitter's and England's darling?

@askjeevesdotcom guess what the arsehole @brumplum called @stephenfry boring when stepehn fry isnt

Fry defended brumplum and the two made up:

stephenfry: @brumplum I am so sorry to hear ppl have been abusing you. You had every right to say what you did. Pls accept my apols. This is so awful.

brumplum: @stephenfry Thanks. Can we all be friends again? *tweet favourited* (I have an ego as big as the next man!) ;-)

As already mentioned, the whole story was covered in detail in the Guardian and much of the other media.

Art has already died more times than Dracula, but down it goes again...

Jonathan Jones, who reviews old art for the Guardian, has written a savage attack on Damien Hirst and contemporary art:

Hirst's exhibition is a stupefying admission of defeat, a self-obliterating homage, that reveals the most successful artist of our time to be a tiny talent, with less to offer than even the most obscure Victorian painter in the Wallace Collection [...] Hirst has said: I want to be compared directly with the old masters, on their own turf, in their own visual language. In his eyes, it would seem that all the readymades, all the vitrines – all the ideas that have made him rich – are not real art at all. They are substitutes for the art he wishes he could make. The one truly great art, in his eyes, is the high western tradition of oil painting. He can't do that at all; can't paint his way out of a paper bag. [...] No critic has even come close to the total dismissal of 21st-century art implied by Hirst's turnabout.

Tales of central Asia: the artist and the Islamist soldier

Adam Curtis traces (1 2) the relationship between conceptual artist Alighiero e Boetti and 18th century Muslim rebel Sheikh Mansur who led the Chechens against the Russian empire under Catherine the Great. Mansur may have been born in Italy, a one-time monk called Giovani Batista Boetti who went to the region a missionary, fell in love with the daughter of a local leader, and converted to Islam. He was also, perhaps, an ancestor of the other Boetti - unless the letters from Mansur, found in Turin in the late 19th century, describing his Italian roots, were forgeries. Alighiero e Boetti, an artist with roots in the arte povera movement, arrived in central Asia - Afghanistan - in 1971. Seeking to expunge western ideas of creativity and individuality, the later Boetti paid Afghan weavers to produce embroidered designs for him, maps of the world and diagrams encoding the predicted date of his death. He also bought a hotel and took a lot of heroin; with the new flow of western travellers to the region, heroin became increasingly popular, and people started to smuggle it back to Europe. In the last few years, Italian soldiers have arrived in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban, who are at once Islamist warriors and drug dealers.

Screen-scraping from Wikipedia to Google Books

Most people will have had this experience: you go to a search engine and type in a search term and up come a host of results with what looks like encyclopedic entries. But you click on them and they all have exactly the same text.

This practice is known generally as data scraping. For online data, it's web scraping or web harvesting. When you're reading webpages and taking the text from them, that's screen scraping, but it's also possible to use RSS feeds, databases, and other sources to get text. Why? Well, once you have text, you can get people reading it, and once you have readers, you can get money from advertising.

Thanks to Google and other less reputable ad brokers, it's easy to stick ads on your webpage and make some money. For this reason, many people thought Google would never remove screen-scraping sites from their search, but recently they seem to have taken action and such sites have fallen down the rankings.

answers.com is perhaps the leading example, reproducing Wikipedia pages, though other sites do the same - wapedia reformats Wikipedia for mobiles; astrology site astrotheme.com combines star signs with Wikipedia biographies. Sites such as fullbooks.com display uncopyrighted books - their edition of Emma serves Google ads asking "Looking For Rich Women" and offering "Inside A Boyfriends Mind". Anyone can display an out-of-copyright text, and because of the licensing of Wikipedia content, it can be reproduced as long as you credit or link back to the source. Wikipedia does not show advertising but many of the sites reproducing its content do.

Some companies attempt to increase their value by adding extra functionality. The now-defunct LJ Find, for instance, scraped LiveJournal (based on RSS feeds) and offered a search facility - something the site itself didn't offer - as well as displaying the entire contents of people's journals with ads alongside. Other sites offer fully-searchable novels, or attempt to package content from multiple sites onto one page.

It's in this context that I come to Google Books. While Google have removed many of the web-scraping sites from their search results, the world's leading ad broker has another way of making money from other people's content. They have digitised a huge number of books and now serve them up online with appropriate adverts displayed both when you search for a book, and in a side panel when you read the book. I'll be interested to see if anyone can screen-scrape the books that Google has scraped from the world's libraries, and put up their own advertisements - or even better, ads supplied by Google.

Annoy a liberal: work hard. Annoy a conservative: tweet?

The new Freakonomics book from Levitt and Dubner has caused controversy. Critics have accused them of wilful contradictarianism, and moved on to question why their controversialism is anti-liberal, and thence to ask why it seems to be so much more fun to contradict liberals than conservatives.

Andrew Gelman asks:

why is it that "pissing off liberals" is delightfully transgressive and oh-so-fun, whereas "pissing off conservatives" is boring and earnest?

He mentions Nate Silver and Michael Moore as people who successfully piss off conservatives, but they're in the minority of all the counterintuitive argumentation in the world.

Kieran Healy complains that it's impossible to get a liberal equivalent of the rightwing bumper sticker "Annoy a Liberal. Work hard. Succeed. Be happy." Commenter Anthony (referencing a remark of LBJ's) relates this to the apologetic nature of liberals:

American liberals have a problem because it's altogether too easy to force them to deny that they're pig-fuckers, and they have no clue why.

Another commenter, Bad Jim, may get closer to the problem

It's a waste of time to piss off conservatives. They're already as angry as can be.

John Quiggin continues the debate by questioning the idea of whether it's really so wonderful to be contrarian (even though it does sell books.

Contrarianism is a cheap way of allowing ideological hacks to think of themselves as fearless, independent thinkers, while never thinking (in fact reinforcing) the status quo. [...] To sum up my current view: "contrarianism" is mostly contrary to reality, the "conventional wisdom" is probably wiser than the typical unconventional alternative, and "politically incorrect" views are almost always incorrect in every way: literally, scientifically and morally.

Mark Liberman, in a blog post called "Freakonomics: the intellectual's Glenn Beck?" is suspicious of the contrarian economists, referencing Barbara Ehrenreich's recent critique of their claim that statistics show women are more miserable now than pre-feminism. He points out that contrarianism of whatever stripe sells books. And J Bradford Delong offers advice on how Levitt and Dubner could rewrite their own book.

Disputes about global warming are hardly novel, and nor is worrying over the lack of left-wing polemic, particularly in an America where Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck call the shots. In Britain the more common complaint is that all satirists are left-wing (except Ian Hislop). But the right still have Jeremy Clarkson, Jeremy Kyle, possibly James Whale. The left may have jokes and sandals, but they're not ranting, with even civil liberties being as likely to be defended by crazy hate-filled right-libertarians as by bleeding heart liberals.

Despite this, Twitter's British membership (which sometimes seems to be the entire Guardian readership and their electronic devices) seems quite adept at conducting nice witch-hunts with liberal ideals, with the last few days seeing agitated action against Carter-Ruck and Trafigura injuncting newspapers and Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir being homophobic following Stephen Gately's death, following the more benign welovetheNHS Twitter campaign.

But is it the left shouting here? Much of the antipathy to Carter-Ruck came from right-wing bloggers: Iain Dale, Guido Fawkes, and the Spectator. It's fun having a go at judges and shady multinationals, playing the game of figuring out what's being injuncted; your politics isn't important. Likewise, based on most people's uninterest in the Mail's past transgressions it seems to be mainly Boyzone fans who're really upset with the coverage of Gately's death. Sometimes you need to join a crowd and shout against conservatives and capitalists, but that doesn't make you a socialist. Though maybe Gately did more for gay rights than Peter Tatchell.

Sic ASA Parrot

The first edition of what will hopefully be a regular roundup of adjudications by the Advertising Standards Authority, the British ad industry watchdog.

Danone not so good for you? The yogurt manufacturer failed to show Actimel is "scientifically proven to help support your kids' defences". Referenced studies were on hospitalised Indian kids or children under 3 years, neither of which featured in the TV ad.

Peta falsely imply that eating meat causes swine flu. Rearing pigs might get you, but fortunately most bacon-eaters never see a real live oinker.

Male drivers ARE dangerous. A government campaign warned women not to get into a car with a man if she didn't trust his driving. A viewer felt this was offensive to male drivers, not all of whom are crazed careless killers on wheels (allegedly). The ASA felt the ad "highlighted the statistical risks to encourage prudent behaviour" - who could ask for anything more?

Abtronic? Abysmal. Sellers of an electronic muscle-stimulation belt were picked up by ASA monitors. Oh dear: it's not the easy path to a sculpted six-pack, no substitute for going to the gym, and the ASA doubted claims that it was relaxing, suggesting there's no pain no gain: "We acknowledged that the 'relaxation' setting on the Abtronic X2 was likely to feel relatively comfortable, but considered that to achieve the claimed muscle-toning, the Abtronic X2 would need to be set to the exercise programme, which was likely to cause some pain or discomfort." Ouch!

We Buy Any Car vindicated. They'll buy any car, even a limo, but not your pick-up. Because it's not a car. Sorry, complainer!

Tesco and Asda are at war. The casus belli: who has the cheaper prices. Asda tries to prove it's better with an independent price comparison website checking a wide selection of products. Tesco has a different plan. They select random people's shopping baskets (I assume they store details of everything each person buys, rather than grabbing a random shopper as he heads for the tills with two fillet steaks, a bottle of Cava, and a twelve-pack of condoms), and they check the price of this randomly selected basket against what Asda would sell it for. Someone complained, objecting that this is biased as it doesn't take account of the fact that 95% of Tesco products could be overpriced, but if people walk in the door, see the prices, refuse to buy the bad-value stuff and just take the buy-one-get-one-free spinach bags and the half-price wine from a country you've never heard of, then Tesco will look really cheap (assuming ASDA doesn't have deals on spinach and Bolivian Merlot). The response: "Tesco said it was generally accepted that advertising sought to present companies in the most favourable light. Price comparison ads were, by their very nature, highly biased in favour of the advertiser." The ASA said: victory to Tesco. Also cheaper than Boots, by slightly better reasoning.

Park's miracle mattress won't help you concentrate or relieve your pain.

Coke in trouble over Vitaminwater. Viewers may confuse Jean-Claude van Damme and Brussels sprouts, and that's just the beginning of their problems, as the ASA dispute their health benefits and suggest 4.6g sugar/100ml is a lot of calories for a drink that claims to be water.

Something about frying-related franchises. Purifry Ltd challenge FiltaFry's uniqueness. Purifry offers franchised deep-fat fryer care, cleaning, and oil disposal. FiltaFry do much the same but their website has exciting videos! There are business opportunities here! It's war of the fryers! This could get messy!

talkSPORT offer pre-pay Maestro cards? And don't tell you that there's a fee for topping them up? Naughty.

Penis pump maker deflated.

Chinese buffet ok. Anyone can call themselves "world famous" even if nobody's heard of you - it's a meaningless subjective phrase not a statement of fact.

Mercedes not so environmentally sound.

Leona Lewis in trouble: apparently if you call something your "new album" it shouldn't just be a bunch of old tracks in a new cover.

Guthy-Renker beauty products - this web page offers ASA highlights, but it seems that most of their adjudications are against utility companies, made-up religions, and French cosmetics with dubious scientific claims.

Universal Church of the Kingdom of God's blessed oil probably won't save your life, even with the disclaimer "The UCKG does not claim to heal people but believes that God can through the power of faith."

The Queen is in trouble: truly the ASA fears nobody. The Duchy of Lancaster making unjustified claims in an attempt to build new houses in the ancient village of Cloughton.

Book of historical failures

An amusing old conspiracy theory has recently come my way. In 1981 many right-wing Labour party members quit to form a new party, the SDP. The year before, the Labour party had elected the very left-wing and pro-disarmament Michael Foot as its leader. Some of those who formed the SDP voted for Foot despite their political differences. Why? Nevil Sandelson, an MP for Labour and later the SDP, claimed that he was one of six right-wing Labour members who conspired to elect Foot and thus destroy the Labour party. Sandelson went even further: as an SDP MP in 1987 he called on voters to vote for the Tories rather than his own party, in order to destroy Labour more thoroughly. Could any MPs today have similar plans? (The Telegraph's obituary of Sandelson)

In a garret or Waitrose - on the earnings of poets

Earlier this month, New Zealand poet Leigh Davis died, aged just 54 (Charles Bernstein; National Business Review). As well as a poet and publisher, Davis was a successful businessman and merchant banker.

Despite the popular impression of starving poets in garrets, many poets actually made or make a decent living - just not from poetry. While some doubtless get by in menial jobs waiting tables or cleaning floors, most successful poets seem to find some form of middle-class employment. Perhaps the starving poets can't afford the stamps to submit their work or like Weldon Kees and Hart Crane commit suicide, or maybe poetry does bring rewards. Clearly there is more research to be done on whether the jobs precede or follow the poetry. What follows is just a sketch of how poets get their money.

Insurance executive Wallace Stevens is one of the most famous examples, working his way to vice-president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. The few poets to be seriously rich have inherited their money, such as Frederick Seidel, who is acclaimed as one of the greatest living American poets for verse about wasted lives and motorbikes, and Elizabeth Bishop who was independently wealthy until late in her life. Richer than both was James Merrill, the son of Charles Merrill of Merrill Lynch. In an earlier age, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the child of a wealthy sugar plantation owner, although later they fell on hard times and she married Robert Browning.

While few poets were as rich as those, poetry is perhaps the most middle-class of all the arts. William Carlos Williams was a doctor, though not wealthy. TS Eliot worked for Lloyd's Bank until 1925. Robert Bridges, who had little success as a poet during his lifetime, was a doctor until lung disease forced his retirement. RS Thomas was a clergyman who lived a very simple, austere life; in an earlier age, Gerard Manley Hopkins was a priest though he never published during his lifetime. For women poets, a husband is a common source of income - these days perhaps it works the other way around. Edna St. Vincent Millay was supported by her husband in her verse and unconventional life. HD (Hilda Doolittle) had wealthy husbands and many admirers. Sylvia Plath, little-known during her life, had a pushy mother and a husband with connections.

The best or luckiest poets, particularly the Americans, supplemented their income with grants and awards such as the Fulbright program, Guggenheim fellowship, and MacArthur fellowship, which can provide large sums.

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There is a welfare system for poets with fewer commercially-valuable skills and no ancestors in trade: this funding scheme is the university system, active on both sides of the Atlantic. Some poets, such as AE Housman and William Empson, were at the top of their academic specialisms, others were inspirational teachers. Some probably got their jobs through their fame as a poet; others took a conventional route into academia. Here follows a brief list of poets in academia:

• Maya Angelou: Wake Forest University (American studies)
• John Ashbery: Brooklyn College, Bards College (languages and literature)
• WH Auden: U of Michigan, Bennington, Smith, Oxford (poetry) and others
• Charles Bernstein: Columbia University, Brown University, and Princeton University (poetry and creative writing)
• John Berryman: U of Iowa
• Elizabeth Bishop: U of Washington, Harvard, NYU, MIT
• Carol Ann Duffy: Manchester Metropolitan University (English and creative writing)
• William Empson: Peking University, Sheffield (English), and others
• Robert Frost: Middlebury College, and others
• Seamus Heaney: Berkeley, Queens Belfast, and Carysfort College (a teacher-training college)
• AE Housman: UCL and Cambridge (Latin)
• Randall Jarrell: University of Texas at Austin, Sarah Lawrence, University of North Carolina
• Louis MacNeice: Birmingham (UK) (classics), Bedford (London) (Greek)
• Edwin Morgan: University of Glasgow (literature)
• Paul Muldoon: Oxford (poetry), St Andrews, Princeton, and others.
• Sean O'Brien: Sheffield Hallam (poetry), Newcastle (creative writing)
• Charles Olson: Black Mountain College (literature)
• Don Paterson: St Andrews (English)
• Bob Perelman: Penn (English)
• JH Prynne: Cambridge (English literature and poetry)
• Henry Reed: U of Washington
• Adrienne Rich: Rutgers, Stanford, and others
• Theodore Roethke: Michigan State, U of Washington, and others
• Delmore Schwartz: Princeton and others (creative writing)
• Stephen Spender: U of Cincinnati, Gresham College, UCL (English), and others
• George Szirtes: UEA, Norwich School of Art and Design (creative writing)
• Allen Tate: Princeton (creative writing) and others
• Derek Walcott: Boston U (poetry and drama), University of Alberta (creative writing)

And Philip Larkin was a librarian at Hull University (by most accounts a good one and an efficient organiser).

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Many poets made a living from a career in writing - not writing poetry, which does not make many people rich, but in other forms of wordsmithery, such as fiction. Cecil Day Lewis, the son of a clergyman, wrote detective novels as Nicholas Blake. John Masefield wrote numerous novels, including children's classic The Box of Delights, and military history. Thomas Hardy had become a famous novelist by the time he turned to poetry. Robert Graves wrote the very popular WWI memoir Good-bye to All That, the novel I, Claudius, and the philosophical book The White Goddess. Siegfried Sassoon wrote most of his poetry while in the army, but had his principal successes with prose such as Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. Maya Angelou is also known for her autobiographical fiction and lectures. Robert Penn Warren is best known for the novel All The King's Men, which has been filmed twice. Carl Sandburg wrote children's stories and much other prose. Langston Hughes wrote in almost every form: fiction, a screenplay, books for children, autobiography, plays, opera libretti, essays, and translations. Although poor for much of his life, Charles Bukowski wrote cult novels, some of which were eventually filmed. Hugh MacDiarmid wrote prose, translations from Scottish Gaelic, and journalism. George Szirtes works as a translator and publisher as well as teaching and writing.

Ian Hamilton worked as a journalist and critic and wrote books on football and poetry. John Betjeman, self-styled "poet and hack" wrote journalism, often on architecture or other aspects of England, and presented programs for the BBC. Christopher Logue worked as a journalist, playwright, screenwriter, and actor. Alfred Austin was a journalist and editor, and wrote prose and plays. John Ashbery worked as journalist, art critic, and translator. Hugo Williams has worked as a film, theatre, and music critic and poetry editor for various magazines. Henry Reed, a man known for one great poem, The Naming of Parts, wrote a lot of radio drama before getting a teaching job. Louis MacNeice worked for the BBC as a reporter and dramatist. Stephen Spender and Randall Jarrell also worked extensively in literary journalism, editing, and criticism.

In addition to those working for magazines or small presses, poets including Cecil Day Lewis, TS Eliot, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti have worked more seriously in publishing. At Faber and Faber, Eliot published many of the finest poets of the 20th century. Stevie Smith worked as a secretary at the firm of magazine publisher George Newnes. Michael Longley worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for many years. Other poets such as WB Yeats and Derek Walcott have been active at running theatres.

Ted Hughes seems to have made a living at least partly from poetry, although he wrote classic children's book The Iron Man and non-fiction. Allen Ginsberg lived largely off his poetry, readings, etc, although later in his life he taught English at Brooklyn College. Gregory Corso, a petty criminal in his youth, later lived off the legend of the Beats with readings and occasional teaching jobs. The Australian poet Les Murray retired to write full-time in his 30s.

Of course there are other ways you can get money. TS Eliot's estate receives a lot of money from the musical Cats. Ian Hamilton Finlay was a successful artist, working with numerous collaborators on many commissions. Robert Frost had a farm, though he also taught English and creative writing for most of his life. Langston Hughes worked for a while as a hotel busboy to have time to write, while Charles Bukowski worked for the US postal service. Dylan Thomas worked for the BBC but his main life skill seems to have been a talent for borrowing money, and he's not the only poet to have lived from hand to mouth.

And spare a thought for those like Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Alun Lewis, Keith Douglas, and Sylvia Plath who didn't live long enough to have a chance as professional poets.

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For a concrete proof of the central place of academia in poetry, look at winners of the TS Eliot Prize, reckoned Britain's most prestigious poetry award:

• 2008 - Jen Hadfield, Nigh-No-Place (main income unknown, but sells books and visual artworks, lives in Shetland)
• 2007 - Sean O'Brien, The Drowned Book (worked Newcastle University)
• 2006 - Seamus Heaney, District and Circle (formerly Carysfort College etc)
• 2005 - Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture (worked Manchester Metropolitan U)
• 2004 - George Szirtes, Reel (worked Norwich School of Art and Design and UEA)
• 2003 - Don Paterson, Landing Light (worked St Andrews)
• 2002 - Alice Oswald, Dart (unknown - lives with husband and children in Devon)
• 2001 - Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband (worked McGill - reticent about life)
• 2000 - Michael Longley, The Weather in Japan (Combined Arts Director, Arts Council of Northern Ireland)
• 1999 - Hugo Williams, Billy's Rain (critic and editor)
• 1998 - Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters (poetry and prose)
• 1997 - Don Paterson, God's Gift to Women (worked St Andrews, as above)
• 1996 - Les Murray, Subhuman Redneck Poems (writes full-time)
• 1995 - Mark Doty, My Alexandria (worked Rutgers)
• 1994 - Paul Muldoon, The Annals of Chile (worked Princeton)
• 1993 - Ciaran Carson, First Language: Poems (worked Queen's Belfast)

Of 15 winners, 9 teach or have retired from teaching, 1 worked in arts administration, 1 works in journalism, 2 are of unknown income, and 2 may have lived largely from poetry (Hughes and Murray).

This is not the place to delineate the tightly-knit web of modern poetry (Private Eye has chronicled the too-close relations between poetry judges and poetry prize-winners, for instance). Nor will I speculate on whether this narrowness and inwardness is a weakness. This is a matter for further inquiry, which should probably focus on both financial questions and the comparison of career paths in poetry and academia.

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I won't list individual sources here, but references included Ian Hamilton's Against Oblivion: some lives of the 20th century poets; Wikipedia; various university websites; www.poetryarchive.org; www.kirjasto.sci.fi; The Guardian and other newspapers. I wasn't able to come up with a clear picture on the earnings of some poets, including Robert Lowell, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Marianne Moore, Andrew Motion, EE Cummings. As I said, work in progress.