Poets Is Miserable Barstids - How we read

I've been corresponding via facebook recently with a lad who's currently having to study poems by both me and Carol Ann Duffy for AS-level. It's become clear that he and his mates have conceived a poisonous dislike for Duffy's poems, because, he says, the teachers have chosen such "depressing" ones to study. I seem to have escaped lightly, because, though I write at least as many depressing ones as she does, I'm the comparison object in the module and the students can, more or less, choose what poems of mine they want to look at, so they all chose the upbeat ones.

This kinda surprised me. We all think teenagers are a self-pitying, self-dramatising lot who like gloomy songs and poems. But he isn't the first I've come across who has expressed the opposite view. I'm beginning to wonder whether we are still haunted by the Romantic image of the poet as a seedy fellow with a death wish.

There's a 12th-century German lyric: ( here )