Why are all the best poems sad?
— Your father That’s a good question, though I’m sure not everybody feels that the best poems are sad; they think that the best poems are the erotic ones by the 14th-century Indian poet Kabir. But seriously, people tend to think that the best poems are the ones they can understand and identify with, and it’s not difficult at all to understand and identify with sadness, so it’s true: A lot of people think that the best poems out there are the sad ones. I think that’s because many societies often encourage overlook feelings of sadness or pain. Something bad happens, and we are pushed to move on, look to the future and not to the past. That’s not necessarily bad; it’s society’s job to mold each member into a productive contributor in the present, and we aren’t very productive when we’re sad. But a poet’s job is to capture emotion, be it humor, eroticism, or grief, and grief often seems the most poignant because we never look at grief as intimately as a good poem does. And maybe someone do
