Poets are a civilised lot, so they tell us, which is remarkable considering how little hard cash they garner from their efforts. We would expect Seamus Heaney, riding high in hard covers at the top of the poetry league table, to be quite comfortable - his Whitbread-winning version of Beowulf is the twelfth best-selling title on amazon.co.uk. But go further down the charts and the poets begin to look a little less prosperous, with TS Eliot prizewinner Hugo Williams, for example, a frequent contributor to the TLS on the subject of the precariousness of freelance life.

If you want to make money out of verse, best get extensively quoted in a film. Il Postino did it for Pablo Neruda, who had also featured in Truly Madly Deeply - although the riches came a little too late. Neruda died in 1973

Top 10 poetry books

1 Beowulf
Anon, trs Seamus Heaney
Faber, £14.99
Buy it at BOL

2 Autumn Journal
Louis MacNeice
Faber, £7.99
Buy it at BOL

3 Songs of Innocence and Experience
William Blake
OUP, £7.99
Buy it at BOL

4 Killing Time
Simon Armitage
Faber, £6.99
Buy it at BOL

5 The World's Wife
Carol Ann Duffy
Picador, £10
Buy it at BOL

6 Love
Pablo Neruda
Harvill, £4.99
Buy it at BOL

7 The Nation's Favourite Twentieth Century Poems
ed. Griff Rhys Jones
BBC Books, £5.99
Buy it at BOL

8 Collected Poems
C.P. Cavafy
Chatto and Windus, £9.99
Buy it at BOL

9 Billy's Rain
Hugo Williams
Faber, £7.99
Buy it at BOL

10 Last Words
ed. Don Paterson and Jo Shapcott
Picador, £7.99
Buy it at BOL