When I was in college, a professor of mine had a sign by the door of his office that read, "Date a poet, get engaged to a novelist, but marry an essayist." He was, of course, an essayist. I don't begrudge him this: I often like to think of myself as an essayist who is experimenting with poetry. But I wonder why it made me feel so strongly, why now, years later, I still find it floating around, untethered, in my mind on occasion. Perhaps it is because I see myself as an erstwhile (and perhaps future) poet but I am definitely what can affectionately be called "the marrying type." Boring. Responsible. Dependable. Calm. Collected. I'm hardly the daring, wild-eyed, passionate poet of yore, identifiable primarily by emotional intensity, a freewheeling movement through life, and (probably) an early death.
This image of the poet is based on history--or so we are led to believe: Poe, Plath, Whitman, Wilde, and, of course, Byron. This image gained archetypal status through Byron and his contemporaries: the second generation of British Romantic poets. This understanding of the poet as passionate, unconventional, etc. has given rise to what I'll call—for lack of a better term—a Romantic Bohemian Poetics (at least in English poetry). I'm not against this form of poetics, but I do reject it as representing all of poetry or poets. As a totalizing vision, it fails.
The Romantic Bohemian image of the poet endures as an archetype likely due to some historical quirks related to the history of the genre in English, specifically its collapse as a popular art form after (more or less) T.S. Eliot and some of his contemporaries, leaving Romanticism the final dominant mood of popular poetry. So this stereotype endures—a specter that has haunted poetry for nearly a hundred years. Part of the problem with it is that it doesn't even represent the existing poetic tradition, let alone the entirety of what poetry could include. Robert Frost was eccentric, sure, but certainly no Byron. Emily Dickinson had an... interesting lifestyle, but it was hardly one I would call bohemian (unlike some revisionist pop culture representations of her would lead you to believe). Gerard Manly Hopkins was a monk and Wallace Stevens had a day job as a banker. These last two are about the furthest thing from “bohemian” that I can imagine. Even William Wordsworth—the Romantic's romantic—grew up and became a priest.
Again, I have nothing against the Romantics or any of the other poets who fit their mold (for what it's worth, I find Wordsworth's definition of poetry ("the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings... recollected in tranquility") to be the best ever written). But the tradition of English poetry is much—much—more varied and beautiful than the stereotypes would lead you to believe. (Go read some John Donne or George Herbert if you think I'm kidding.) And that's the way it is supposed to be. Poetry is nothing more or less than a disciplined, formal (in the technical sense) form of written or oral communication and thus can and should represent the entirety of the human experience, not just the Romantic Bohemian slice of it. Now, certainly, Romantic Bohemians can conceive of—and write about—experiences other than their own. But the very identification of them as a social class means that there are certain other human experiences that will lie forever beyond their artistic reach. A broad vision of poetry will require more poets—not fewer, and certainly will not be limited to poets that fit only a narrow caricature. Thus, it is incumbent on all of us to write—and speak!—about our experiences and to do so in a poetic way.