No one should write poetry for money. No one can expect to make any money either. Even a Poet Laureate, or whoever gets to occupy the professor’s chair just vacated by Ruth Padel, will need other jobs, and other income, to make ends meet.

Poets make money out of patronage and from winning prizes. They grab fame, and fortune, thanks to our prurient fascination with their personal lives. Plays do quite well for them as well. But poetry itself? Not so much. And hardly ever for poems that win lasting, high, artistic acclaim.

Tennyson and Kipling, alongside other Victorians and Georgians from the golden age of poetic popularity, sold enough to keep the wolf from the door. So did James Riley, the Indiana-born bard who died, far from the first war trenches that inspired many poorer but better-remembered contemporaries, of a stroke in 1916. Martin Tupper was a popular Victorian poet who coined decent sums from his now-forgotten Proverbial Philosophies. But better financial rewards came with the cousin who gave his same name to Tupperware.

T.S. Eliot, according to a 1958 report, made $1 million from his play, The Cocktail Party, and his Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, thanks to Andrew Lloyd Webber, has been a mouth-watering money-spinner. But his mould-breaking poems inhabit a commercial waste land in comparison. James Fenton, who has sat in Oxford’s Chair of Poetry, is one of our finest living poets. Yet he owes his substantial wealth to work done versifying for the creators of Les Misérables, the decidedly proletarian musical. Even Pam Ayres, whose quaintly comic ditties make her one of the most widely read British poets of recent years, made her first fortune out of a television ad for cream cheese.

Anthologies, especially those aimed at children, are the best way of earning honest cash from couplets. Philip Larkin left only a modest financial legacy but it was earned largely from editing a high-selling anthology, The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse.

Without the patronage of impresario-contemporaries, William Shakespeare’s unparalleled iambs might have been left prancing pentametrically in his head, his time and artistic energy overtaken by the tedious task of putting food on the table. Rich patrons of modern poetry include Felix Dennis, better known as the Oz publisher.

The financial support he provides pales beside the funds of Ruth Lilly, heiress to the US drugs empire, who gave $100 million to what is now the Poetry Foundation in 2002. As well as securing the finances of a magazine called Poetry, that bequest funds a $100,000 prize for contemporary American bardsters, as well as five $15,000 fellowships. Awards such as these, albeit less generous, are among the few ways good poets make money from good poems.

The Ted Hughes/Sylvia Plath soap opera did more for their work than their achingly intense words. In similar vein, Ruth Padel’s unseeming scrape with celebrity may well bolster her bank balance far more than anything brought courtesy of a Professor’s chair. The personal issues raised, and the vastly improved name recognition that comes with it, could be worth much more to Padel than any poesy, no matter how tenderly or powerfully crafted. Sales of her own collections will rise, and if that only makes them less unprofitable, she can look forward to more work as a reviewer and lecturer; an authority on poets-as-outcasts, or using dirty tricks in election campaigns.

Since words of eternal beauty cannot and should not be bought or sold, it is good that poetry cannot be tied to purse strings. But is it intrinsically uneconomic? Was Pope a poet?

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy