A poetic gift is not a guarantee of a steady income and often cannot feed a poet. A poet, especially a beginner, has to combine poetic creativity with other occupations, sometimes having nothing to do with literature. Poets are not neglected and trade. The question of whether a poet and a merchant can coexist in one person does not have an unequivocal answer. Everything depends on the personality of the person, on the concrete-historical conditions, on the circumstances in which the poet lives and creates. Within the framework of this article we will consider the question of how the trade activity influenced the life of two Voronezh poets of the first half of the XIX century - Alexei Vasilievich Koltsov (1809 - 1842) and Ivan Savvich Nikitin (1824 - 1861).