I think saying that a poet is someone who must write or die is the kind of hyperbolic remark you would expect a poet to come out with. Maslow does not include it in his hierarchy of needs. I’ve gone years without putting pen to paper but I’m certainly no hobbyist. When people ask me why I write I say it is because I cannot not write. What I mean by that is that it is for me the natural thing to do to relieve the pressure in my head. It’s not always poetry though. I’ve written songs, short stories, novels and plays. I write for me and no one else. That other people like what I do is gravy.

Hobbyist is a rather condescending term. Look at some of the model ships hobbyists have turned out and that puts the term into perspective. Many great artists and writers have had to hold down full time jobs and used their spare time to work on their craft (Charles Ives jumps immediately to mind). Amateur might be a better term and, to my mind, an amateur is someone who does what they do for the love of it rather than for filthy lucre or fame.

I have never attended a workshop or gone to a writing retreat, I’ve been to one poetry reading in my life (and didn’t much care for it) and have written in almost total isolation from the literary community for thirty-five years. I used to sweat blood over poems for months whereas nowadays I rarely find the need to revise and virtually all my poems just come to me; I have written nearly a thousand that way. For over a decade I never even attempted to get anything published.

So what am I? I am a Poet with a capital P. I literally think poetry. It is what I see when I look in the mirror. When I define myself it is at the top of the list. I am never happier (or what passes for happiness with me) than when I am working on or have just had a poem handed back to me by the wife with her usual understated praise.

How would I identify a Poet who was just starting off? One thing I would look for would be their passion. The blogger who prompted you to write this post had that kind of passion. They were willing to stand between their poetry and the rest of the world and defend their right to say what they wanted the way they wanted and to call it poetry. That is a good start. I was like that when I was a teenager. I would argue on behalf on every word, every comma.

The Scottish poet William McGonagall is comically renowned as one of the worst poets in the English language. “Poet-baiting” became a popular pastime in Dundee, but McGonagall seemed oblivious to the general opinion of his poems, even when his audience were pelting him with eggs and vegetables. Any man who would go though that must either be an eejit (idiot to the rest of the world) or a Poet, possibly both.

I have to say I’m fundamentally opposed to elitism and snobbishness in the arts. I hate poets who look down on novelists for example. It’s all writing. When I was writing my blog about love poetry I looked up some sites to see what was there and most of it made me grue BUT then I looked at the comments readers were making and they were almost all praising the works. You might say that these people wouldn’t know good poetry if it hit them over the head and that may be true but they were genuine, the poets were genuine and it strikes me as a marriage made in heaven. There is a market for everything even the most sickly, saccharine, sentimental love poetry.

I have a blog coming up in which I talk about my late mother’s poetry. She only wrote a few poems late in life but she poured everything into them and used her limited ability – educated she was not (she was the school dunce) – to render these words capable of holding what she had to say. Was she a poet with or without a capital P? I don’t know. Did she write poetry? Absolutely!

in the earlier debate you referenced in this post, i was on the side of the first definitions offered by the dictionary. if you write poetry your a poet. i still think that. AND (not but) AND, i wholeheartedly embrace your distinction between the hobbyist and the professional with no judgment about which one a person chooses to pursue.

The meat of this for me: “Rather the primary distinction between a professional poet and the hobbyist is that the professional poet will spend hours and countless dollars improving a poem that takes years to get an ounce of recognition while the hobbyist will spend ten minutes jotting down notes just to read on Saturday night at the local coffee shop reading and then never look at it again except to post it on his blog two months later. The dilemma for the hobbyist poet is that he desperately wants to be noticed and recognized as a poet, but he doesn’t want to put in the time, the sweat, the urgency that other poets put into the revision process.” (and i would add that the hobbyist poet doesn’t really want to hear any form of feedback/critique except: great poem!)

this is an amazing post; i’m going to link to it now.