Third-time Forward Poetry prize-winner Sean O'Brien defended his description of his work as "an affliction" in the Guardian last Saturday, suggesting that poetry is more of a calling than a career. "The choices are either: Write poetry or go mad, or write poetry and go mad," he said. Poets have been insisting on this for centuries, as countless quotations testify: "The blood jet is poetry / There is no stopping it" (Sylvia Plath); "There is a pleasure in poetic pains which only poets know" (William Cowper); "To be a poet is a condition, not a profession" (Robert Frost); "Verse is not written, it is bled" (Paul Engle). The list goes on, indefinitely. What is this affliction that poets are so desperate to claim, and what is it that makes the drive to write so traumatic and compelling?

It may be true that creative minds are more likely to suffer from emotional disorders - various studies indicate that a cognitive link does exist between creativity and madness. A 1983 study by psychologist Kay Jamison found that 38% of the British artists and writers surveyed had received psychological treatment - 30% higher than the general population. Of the poets surveyed, half had been treated. Whereas in most professions mental illness is considered an obstacle to work, it is almost mandatory for the poet to suffer - and the stereotype of the poet as a tortured and melancholy individual has persisted across the centuries.

Poets have a vested interest in ensuring that this stereotype survives because it is the closest thing the poetry world has to a brand. Pain is eminently marketable and poetry, as most poets are well aware, is not. They accept this fact either because the God of Creativity is merciless, or they have full-time job in publishing, or better still a trust fund. But nobody can help craving recognition for the thing to which they devote their life, and here the idea of the sadistic, whip-cracking Muse comes into its own: the poet is the ultimate attention-seeking masochist, slaving away in the margins of the literary world in the hope of being recognised for sheer endurance, for their abject commitment to something so apparently unrewarding.

Some well-known poets (Sylvia Plath, most notably) are arguably as famous for their troubled emotional lives as for their work. Unfortunately it's an image that works against as well as for poetry's street cred - introduce yourself as a poet to someone at a party, and their reaction will be either disproportionate awe, or embarrassing silence and a rapid change of subject.

Perhaps it's true that, as the American poet Allen Tate remarked, "Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker". Certainly, many people not involved in (or even aware of) the poetry scene do not consider poetry mysterious enough to want to find out about it, expecting poetry readings to be populated by a mixture of ageing middle-class people, and pretentious younger people wearing berets. They would - some of the time - be proved wrong, but poetry is still a tributary miles from the mainstream, half in love with its own obscurity.

"Poetry, like the moon, does not advertise anything," wrote the academic William Blissett, but that seems to take rather too lofty a view of the poet's imperative. Poets are press officers for themselves first and foremost, and secondly for poetry, and if, as Orwell said, "the object of power is power", the object of poetry is poetry.