I used to give a pep talk to new undergraduates at the start of their creative writing degrees, showing stills from films about writers. They were mostly recent films I hoped they might know – Adaptation, Wonder Boys, Stranger Than Fiction, Miss Potter, Becoming Jane, The Hours – with images of authors staring into the distance, chain- smoking at manual typewriters, unshaven or in dressing gowns, all awaiting the muse. The point was to get the students thinking realistically about the work of writing, beyond its cultural baggage. I would end by showing the scene in Breakfast in Tiffany's when Audrey Hepburn's Holly Golightly asks George Peppard's Paul Varjak whether he writes every day. When he says, ‘Sure’, she points out that his typewriter has no ribbon. ‘Don't be like Paul Varjak,’ I’d say. ‘You have to do the work.’

Poetry's status as ‘work’ has been up for debate since at least the eighth century BCE, when Hesiod spent 828 lines of it extolling the virtues of an honest day's graft to his good- for- nothing brother in Works and Days. ‘Between us and goodness, the Gods have placed the sweat of our brows,’ he writes. ‘Work is no disgrace: it is idleness which is a disgrace.’ Though Hesiod is dogmatic about work's value, he seems less interested in what qualifies as work or not. We’re left to infer that the making of verse seemed worthwhile labour for the poet, alongside managing the family farm. Twenty- seven centuries later, Philip Levine's best- known book is just as slippery with its definitions, despite being called What Work Is (1991). ‘You know what work is,’ the speaker says twice, almost accusingly, near the start of the title poem. ‘If you’re / old enough to read this you know what / work is, although you may not do it.’ By the end of the poem, we (‘you’) are waiting in a queue for daily work outside an automotive plant. Yet any assumption of work's hard, physical nature is reconfigured towards what we might now call the ‘emotional labour’ of loving one another (or someone who looks a bit like our brother, in this case). The reason we have failed in that is ‘because you don't know what work is’ after all.