PEOPLE SAY that money and politics shouldn't mix, but what about money and poetry?

Or, more particularly, what about money and Poetry?

Here's a well-regarded and venerable magazine that might have been considered the standard-bearer for genteel poverty for the past 90 years -- it pays $2 a line for a poem, which means a well-crafted sonnet will get you 28 bucks -- and suddenly a rejected poet, who happens to be Ruth Lilly, of the pharmaceutical Lillys, decides to send $100 million its way. Wealth? Wealth doesn't begin to describe it.

Poetry magazine was on the side of art, and now it's on the side of money. But can money be good for, um, poetry?

Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help?

Samuel Johnson said that.

Had I but plenty of money, money enough and to spare,

The house for me, no doubt, were a house in the city-square;

Ah, such a life, such a life, as one leads at the window there!

Robert Browning wrote that.

So, poets don't have to be poor, and a front seat on the action is a lot better than a garret in the attic -- that's what Browning is saying -- but no one's likely to help a poor poet, notes Johnson, until he's made enough of a name for himself that it doesn't matter any more.

"How pleasant it is to have money!" said Arthur Hugh Clough, a British poet hardly anyone remembers. "Thy money perish with thee," says the Bible.

OK, that's why Ms. Lilly, who's 87, gave it over to Poetry. Of course it will live on and do a tremendous amount of good there. Joe Parisi, the editor, has talked about all sorts of endowed programs to encourage the writers of verse, not only in the home port of Chicago but across the country.

But somehow the idea of committees and grant writers and tax-exempt organizations conforming to IRS regulations and stock portfolios -- and of course auditors -- doesn't quite square with the beauty or rage or epiphany of spare words on a page. Symphony orchestras, yes, and art museums, too, because of all the stuff that goes along with them. But where is the infrastructure of a poet?

"He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you," T.S. Eliot pointed out in "The Waste Land."

Turn to the current issue of Poetry (by all means do so) and there you'll find a poem by Billy Collins called "Writing in the Afterlife." The narrator is heading over into Hades, and what good does money do him?

I had heard about the journey to the other side

and the clink of the final coin

in the leather purse of the man holding the oar...

He goes on to discover that Hell is not in the suffering, but in the never-ending description of that suffering that the poet must eternally commit to paper.

That puts things in perspective. Poets have to deal with God and the Devil. Poetry is Damnation. The pedestrian matter of $100 million pales by comparison.

"There's no money in poetry," said Robert Graves, "but then there's no poetry in money, either." Can Poetry prove him wrong?