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Yes, there's an allure. Imagine being as passionately admired by future generations as , say, Yeats. Imagine every trivial circumstance of your life attracting the same wide-eyed fascination of visitors who go to Dove Cottage in search of the marmalade-covered paper-knife. Wouldn't that be to walk the earth as a god, albeit a dead one. There are not many walks of life that hold out such a prospect for long-term celebrity. (Although I believe it's a thorough delusion, and anyway there's little reason to believe that modern poets will ever gain the same aura as our romantic forebears.) There's also cultural power. The profession of poetry, even today, is not merely a joke. The earnings, I suppose, take off once you become well-known enough to be a columnist. Needless to say, none of this has anything to do with writing a good poem. Donald Davie indeed claimed that a poet ought to be aware of the dignity of the profession, of the civic responsibility. He still saw the poet as someone who had the right to address the nation in full seriousness, and who ought to do so. Not sure how many would agree with that, or whether most of us would think it preferable to do exactly the opposite, but you can still see a bit of that aspiration in Cambridge.