My eight-year-old daughter surprised me last week by announcing she would like to be a poet. This is probably a passing phase – the week before that she wanted to be a prophet – but if it continues I will have to dissuade her gently, but as earnestly as if she had announced that she wanted a career in pole dancing or politics.

This is not to belittle poetry; I am the producer of programmes on poetry and the editor of eight anthologies, and no one could be a bigger fan of putting the “best words in the best order” than I am. What I worry about is the notion that poetry is a career: that you can become a poet in the same way that you become a doctor or a chartered accountant or a television presenter.

Being able to write poetry is a gift given to very few. You can learn how to be a better poet but, if the spark isn’t there, no creative writing course will turn you into what Shelley called “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Poetry is a vocation, not a profession, and like all vocations it is to be struggled with and the rewards are scant.

This is where Ruth Padel, Oxford poetry professor for nine days, went wrong. She became a poet quite late in life (she published her first collection when she was 44) and gave up her career in academia to concentrate on it. Like many poets she found that while she received considerable critical acclaim – prizes and so forth – there was little else on offer besides laurel wreaths. There is no professional ladder in poetry, no string of letters after your name.

Padel is ambitious. I met her when she was chairwoman of the Poetry Society, where she did a good job of keeping its volatile members in line. But she wanted more, so when the chair of the Oxford professor of poetry fell vacant she began to lobby for the post in ways that, now they have been exposed to the public gaze, have caused her to resign.

The Oxford post is not a lucrative one. The incumbent is paid a pittance to give a series of lectures on the art of poetry. There are no duck islands, moats or even trouser presses to claim for; the only fringe benefits are a few dinners in college.

Apart from being able to spread your views on poetry to a wider audience, the only real perk is being able to call yourself the Oxford professor of poetry. There aren’t many poetry titles around the world – the other that springs to mind is, of course, the laureateship – and I am sure that an ambitious woman such as Padel was well aware of this when she staked her claim.

In another milieu, such as, say, politics, the fact that she behaved like a character in the TV comedy The Thick of It – using her media contacts to spin against her rival Derek Walcott – would have been accepted as going with the territory. But, as any fule kno, we expect our poets to be more Fotherington-Thomas, “hello clouds, hello sky”, than Damian McBride, “hello poisonous bloggers everywhere”.

Sexual peccadillos we can tolerate – what’s a poet to write about, after all? And even though Walcott was reprehensible for marking his student down when she did not respond to his advances, we ultimately found Padel’s behaviour far more odious because we don’t want our poets to behave like the finalists in The Apprentice.

I can’t help feeling that Padel should have stuck to the day job, like Philip Larkin wisely did. Probably the greatest English poet of the past 50 years, he spent his life working as a university librarian. It was no sinecure, either – he was considered by his peers to have been an accomplished librarian and was responsible for creating the library at the University of Hull.

There was Louis MacNeice, too, a radio producer at the BBC, while Roy Fuller, a former Oxford professor of poetry, spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Woolwich building society. Wallace Stevens worked for a New England insurance company, William Carlos Williams was a doctor and TS Eliot worked in a bank. Stevie Smith was secretary to the chairman of a publishing company and Matthew Arnold was a school inspector.

Most of the above could have given up their day jobs in a second. The reason they didn’t was that they didn’t want poetry to be their job. It’s much easier to be inspired in the course of normal working life than sitting in front of a blank piece of paper, because the problem with giving up your job as a probation officer or a mortician or a teacher is that often it is the daily contact with humanity that provides the inspiration for your work. There are really only so many poems that can be written about the horrors of poetry or the charms of the girl on the creative writing course.

I once made a film about writers and their day jobs for which I interviewed Peter Reading, a fine poet who chose to work as a weighbridge operator in Shropshire because the job didn’t use any of the mind space he needed for his poetry. It has to be said that poets do not always make model employees: Reading was subsequently sacked when the owners brought in a uniform for its operatives and he refused to wear it. Now that’s the kind of gesture we like from our poets – a raised finger to the banality of the corporate world, not sneaky little e-mails to Grub Street.

I’m not surprised that my daughter wants to be a poet – it is a glamorous world, as full of feuds and incomprehensible vendettas as any Balkan state. It easily generates headlines; we are eternally fascinated by the idea of poets and their lives, even if we don’t actually buy their books (although more and more poets are being published, fewer people are actually reading their books).

I hope that while Padel may not be a professor any more, she may, as the result of this furore, at least gain some readers, because in the end what any true poet wants to be remembered for is not prizes or laureateships or chairs of poetry, but for the work itself.

If my daughter did have the gift of poetry – and it is a gift, even if it isn’t always a blessing – I would advise her to find a real job. I would far rather she were a vet or a supermarket manager who wrote verse on the side than a “poet”. Not only because it would keep her from starving, but also because I believe it would make her a better poet.

+ On Tuesday last week, 32-year-old Michelle Jenkins gave birth to a baby boy. Nothing remarkable in that, except that the event took place in the staff room of London Bridge Underground station.

Her son was the first boy ever to have been born on the Tube; the underground network has previously produced two girls, one in 1924 and another just six months ago.

I wonder if this surge in underground births could have anything to do with the fact that when Jenkins went into labour, no fewer than three doctors were sent from nearby St Thomas’ hospital to take charge of the birth.

For anyone who has given birth in an understaffed National Health Service hospital, where midwives and doctors are as rare and precious as a seat on the Piccadilly line in rush hour, the idea of having three doctors in attendance seems positively luxurious.

Perhaps Jenkins knew this. It is hard to imagine why else a heavily pregnant woman would venture onto the Tube in rush hour, unless underground travel, like sex or a really hot curry, is now acknowledged as a way of inducing labour.

Let’s hope that Transport for London does the decent thing and gives the baby an Oyster card for life.

India Knight is away

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