When someone paints a portrait of a poet in their mind, they picture the poet as brooding, head resting in hand or fingers steepled, drinking coffee absentmindedly in a cafe with walls the color of storms.* The word “Byronesque” comes to mind, appropriately.
There’s a very good reason — melancholy makes for good poetry.
Why? Because poets bear the feelings of their society. Not just the positive feelings — all the feels. The feelings we don’t want to deal with, the feelings we’re afraid to deal with, the feelings we wished others understood. Poets even imbue poems about stealing plums from the refrigerator with interpretable, moody meaning.
Poets have a solid qualification to write about society’s moods — poets are moody. They ponder in ways that bring feelings to the surface. They flirt with limerance and relive heartbreak. Their words bleed on the paper as they write with fountain pens in cafes with walls the color of storms.
But you need our melancholy, because you need to visit your own.
* Correction: only the male poets. The female poets always look perky, even though some of the moodiest work ever was by women like Maya Angelou and Gwendolyn Brooks. And Emily Dickinson. And Sylvia Plath. And …
Words Like Me 