What is important to an artist

Poet Mary Oliver, from her book Our World, on her life with photographer Molly Malone Cook:
"In some consideration of my writings, a reviewer once surmised that I must have a private income of some substance, since all I ever seemed to do (in my poems) was wander around Provincetown's woods and its dunes and its long beaches. It was a silly surmise. Looking at the world was one of the important parts of my life, and so that is what I did. It was as simple as that. Poets, if they ever make a living from their writings, do not do so when they are first beginning to publish, and this was years ago. We did not, as I have said before, have much income. We had love and work and play instead."