I'll stand corrected, to an extent, in that Anne is absolutely right in noting that some degree of inspiration is undoubtedly important. I think that perhaps the point I was trying to make was that reliance upon inspiration alone is likely to lead to disappointment.

Also, as Anne noted, it is almost universally agreeed that beginning songwriters cannot expect to produce excellent work right from the first. You have to write a number of not-so-good songs first before you develop the ability to write good ones. Perhaps my failure ever to "become" a songwriter might stem from my unwillingness to write even one of those inferior songs as a way to start down the road to competence.

One huge factor in this discussion is that the financial realities of the music business reward composition, and performance of one's own material, much more lavishly than performance of public-domain stuff. Worse yet, the use of other artists' songs in a commercial context can actually cost you money. This unfortunate "fact-of-life" is probably to blame for much of the inferior musical material with which we are faced on an everyday basis.