The surrealists and the modern movement in painting as a whole seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.
Well the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words that is to say the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.
Not to say people shouldn't get rich from art. I adore the alchemy wherein artists who cast a complex spell make rich people give them their money. (Just writing it makes me cackle.) But too many artists have been making money without magic.