It was the same with Czeslaw Miłosz (poet Nobel laureate) - he wrote that, if he tried to live off his writing, he'd had to resort to writing commercial novels,

It was the same with Czeslaw Miłosz (poet Nobel laureate) - he wrote that, if he tried to live off his writing, he'd had to resort to writing commercial novels, which for him was dreadful. He chose to be a Slavic literature professor at Berkeley instead, and wrote poetry in spare time.