A MUG'S GAME

In the past two years  I have tried to pursue with more urgency my  desire to write poetry.  It is a strange  vocation and one I have  feelt was central to my identity  since my childhood---but  never trusted that I could  make a living  with poetry.  Poetry is my private and secret  pleasure.  It feels like an indulgence.  Even though when I read poems as a child from teh age of 4 to the presnt day  I was  moved and consoled to think that other  people had felt   so badly anad made a poem for  me and others to find and comfort ourselves with .
The  phrase that   labelled  poetry  "a mug's game" is from the poet TS Eliot. What do you think?. 


"[Poetry] may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves." "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." "As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. "