Press cameras flashed last night when the winner of the David Cohen prize for a lifetime's excellence in literature was announced. It went, deservedly, to Seamus Heaney: the greatest poet of our age. Heaney won £40,000, and, as part of the winner's package, was asked to choose the recipient of a further award – a bursary of £12,500, named in honour of arts administrator Clarissa Luard. He chose to bestow it on Poetry Aloud, an annual poetry-speaking competition open to all post-primary students in his native Ireland.
Can you name any of the three quarter-finalists knocked out of Wimbledon last year? Or the 10th-best snooker player in the country? Or who plays centre-forward for Manchester United reserves? One thing all of them have in common is that they earn more in a year than the £40,000 Heaney trousered last night. As for the Luard bursary, those sportsmen would throw away their rackets, cues and boots if that pittance was all their skills earned them.
For many years – his formative ones – Heaney was obliged to keep body and soul together by taking whatever scratch work he could find lecturing and in creative-writing academic posts (many in America). That labour probably cost the national literary heritage four or five slim volumes. Even with the huge acclaim heaped on him for early books such as North, our greatest poet could no more live on his literary earnings than any busker in the London underground. He might have been able to survive. But live? Forget it. And Heaney was top of the tree.
It's the centenary this year of the birth of Stephen Spender, a writer whose name will live for ever, along with Louis MacNeice and WH Auden, as a quintessential "1930s poet". Spender published all his life with Faber – TS Eliot's firm, and the main commercial patron of poetry in this country. One year, Spender (by then a household name) received an annual royalty of 12 shillings and sixpence – equivalent now to around £20. He published virtually no poetry in the last 20 years of his life. Would you?
The paltriness of the awards we give to our poets measures how we truly view poetry. We expect it to come naturally, like Mary's little lambs. Leave them alone and they'll come home, bringing their volumes behind them.
There is, of course, a counter-argument about pipers, payments and tunes. Who were the most generously patronised poets in the 20th century? Members of the Soviet Union's Writers' Union. A high cost was paid for the handsome wages they received: freedom. Even a writer as giftedly devious as Yevgeny Yevtushenko could only get an edgy poem like Babi Yar published with commissar approval. That kind of state patronage doesn't make for great poetry.
But there are, surely, middle ways between our "leave them alone and they'll come home" approach and Party-supervised doggerel of the Soviet kind. The American practice of installing poets as tenured writers in residence in universities is one. There are 109 English departments in this country. Plant a few more poets in them, and the literary garden would bloom. In the meantime, hail Heaney.
