How to Be a Romantic Poet, Part Two

Tip #2: Appear to have been spurned in love! It doesn’t really matter if you have or not, just address slightly melodramatic poems about your suffering, emotional, physical and spiritual to ‘------’. No one has to know you jotted down your quatrain because you stubbed your toe. You are in pain because your one true love, ------, who is coincidentally, every romantic poet’s one true love (Ode to ------, To ------, etc.) does not love you, has died, has decided to marry someone else, or has begged you to stop stalking them. Once again, it helps if you have caught some sort of wasting disease (political radicalism counts as a wasting disease, since you probably won’t live long if you catch it), so as to better enable you to lean upon your couch and sigh over the futility of your passion and of your existence in general.

If at all possible, marry someone you do not care for and immediately fall in love with someone else. As a baseline, try to fall in love with someone very close to you. The closer they are, the more Romantic Poet Points you get (say, one point for your neighbor, two points for your best friend’s sister-in-law, and three points for your own half-sibling). In extreme cases, you are allowed to fall in love with the offspring of another famous author, just as long as you shock said author and their spouse and cause everyone in England to snub you and force you on a tour of the Continent.