Taylor Swift’s next album – set to land next month – is titled The Tortured Poets Department, and oh my, does the title conjure up a very niche and relatable stereotype.

Surely, we all understand (and have fallen prey to) the allure of the tortured poet. They’re the misunderstood wordsmiths of the world; the ones who are so distraught by their neverending tornado of complex emotions and heightened awareness of every single ounce of pain that exists in their orbit — that they’re never truly free to love and be loved. (And their unattainability is frustratingly hot.)

We want to know how they see the world; whether it be beautiful or painful or complicated and we want them to tell it to us, in their twisted and romantic way. The tortured poet can make even the most mundane observations seem like a work of art. 

John Keats described the season of autumn as a “close bosom-friend of the maturing sun,” in one of his infamous poems To Autumn in 1819, somehow making the season of falling dead leaves sound super-sexy and voluptuous.

Sylvia Plath imagined being the mirror that receives her reflection in Mirror in 1961, unpacking what it must be like to swallow an identity and see it for what it truly is:

“Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.”

And more recently, Matty Healy — the famous front-man from The 1975 and Swift’s well-known rebound — has some pretty poetic things to say about the world around him:

“You see, I can’t sleep ‘cause the American Dream

Has been buyin’ up all my self-esteem”

But Matty Healy only represents one part of an entire genre of male characters we continue to melt over for their tortured poet-ness. Just think of Alex Turner (front-man of Arctic Monkeys), Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet, Jacob Elordi, the entire cast of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Harry Styles, Edward Cullen (Twilight) and Jude Law, (in everything) just to name those top of mind. 

And, while this somewhat stereotypical sexy archetype is often male (and white), there are some sexy tortured female poets out there too. For me, it’s queer pop artist FLETCHER, model and actress Ruby Rose and even Angelina Jolie.

Tortured poets are a certified category of hot in celebrity culture, films, TV shows, books, and IRL love interests. I fell victim to the tortured poet type the moment I laid eyes on my 19-year-old neighbour in a Hawaiian shirt at my parents’ dinner party, sloshing red wine all over the tablecloth and talking about underground jazz bars in Europe. I wanted nothing more than to break down his facade — AKA take all his clothes off — and hear all his secrets.

The first girl I ever kissed was a tortured poet too. She carried around a camera but never wanted to feature in a photo herself. I could never read how she truly felt because her sarcastic banter outweighed any flicker of truth, but she exposed herself in her work (and her deep hazel eyes.)

Honestly, I’m not totally over tortured poets. I’m not dating one right now — and I’m pretty damn happy about it — but I still have moments where I remember the wild control tortured poets have had over me at various times in my life.

I’ve taken a little look back into the history of tortured poets and, unsurprisingly, they’ve been sexy for centuries. Let’s take a look at a few of the greats:

PUBLIUS OVIDIUS NASO (OVID) was one of the Roman Empire’s great poets. He wrote about his own life more than most poets of his time and almost all of them centred around love. One of his most famous works was an elegy series in three books called Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), where he playfully instructs women in the art of seduction and teaches men on how to handle it. He was exiled from Rome for this steamy poem (and other reasons that historians have been arguing over for decades.)

LORD BYRON is one of the main historical archetypes of the sexy and tortured poet. His adventurous sexuality, paired with serious athleticism in the physical prime of his early life, made him an attractive figure — in spite of his philandering. He famously embraced many forms of sexual expression (minus the alleged incest) that were ahead of their time and helped to set the stage for more progressive thinking on sexuality – he also wrote some spicy poetry. 

EMILY DICKINSON Often regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry, Emily Dickinson’s allure remains a point of interest for storytellers to this day. There have been countless adaptations of her love life, most recently the show Dickinson starring Hailee Steinfeld. Most spoken about are her female relationships – notably with her schoolmate and later sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert and mutual friend Catherine Scott Turner Anthon – who biographers argue were intense sexual relationships, rather than just nineteenth-century gal pals.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY Author of literary masterpieces such as A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway is one of history’s sexiest and most self-indulgent authors. He is an inspiration for the soft bois worldwide today, constantly revelling in the struggle of being an artist who at times had to live off sherry, oysters and beautiful women – imagine! He was classically handsome and had four marriages full of passion (and deceit) as well as countless lovers.

SYLVIA PLATH is most profusely known for her poetry, fuelled by depressive episodes that eventually led to her suicide. She married once but had a passionate lover previously, who she was said to be still involved with while courting her husband-to-be. She famously strikingly wrote of sexual encounters for women at the time, with phrases such as ‘‘When he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face,” in her last letters. Steamy!