Say you’re in love and the words won’t come. Once upon a time you hired a poet. Petrarch farmed his longing out to the sonnet; courtly troubadours put silk on the tongue of men whose nerves were otherwise rubble. Shakespeare even wrote the instruction manual: Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love—Orlando pinning poems to the trees in As You Like It while everyone rolled their eyes and still, somehow, swooned (Folger Shakespeare Library, As You Like It, III.ii). Today the poet is a...
