This is Purple Prose!

Sir, I abide by your general rule

That every poet is a fool

But Sir you may not know it

Every fool is not a poet!

_ Alexander Pope

Often written by failed Accountants and people who live on a higher plane than the rest of us, poetry is claimed by some to feed the soul. If you find your soul rumbling in the early hours of the morning, reading a few poems will soon fill you up and send you right back to sleep again!

Poetry has two major categories, that which rhymes and that which doesn't. Intellectual snobs prefer the non-rhyming kind because they think how it shows the poet reached beyond the obvious and attained a lyricism of thought rather than words. The non-intellectual snobs, if they have any thought about it at all, prefer the stuff that rhymes because they are easier to remember.

There are, in the main, 3 poetic subjects to choose from: Love, Death and Animals. If you can fit all three into iambic pentameter you will have a successful poem on your hands but will probably never be Poet Laureate.

If the biographies of most poets are anything to go by, to be a good poet you need a tortured soul. Lots of poets have been repressed homosexuals, instigators of incestuous relationships and, in most cases, just downright odd. Success appears to be directly proportional to the number of neuroses of the poet. It seems to be important to die young (A la Rupert Brooke) if you want any lasting fame - preferably in another country (A la Rupert Brooke or Lord Byron). For true fame the cause of death should be a sexually transmitted disease or due to mysterious circumstances.