I think the best you can do with emotional language is collect a host of excellent metaphors and calibrations to outline the abstract, to reign in what you're getting at. Once you know what you're are not talking about you have a much better idea of what you mean.:-)

Agreed, B-Y. That's the role poets used to fill in society a hundred years ago. Poets like Byron*, the celebrities of a by-gone age.

But since the advent of television, and blockbuster movies, we expect all of our emotional experiences to be delivered to us in graphic form.

And poetry doesn't even exist in public schools any more.

Now our celebrities are admired more for their charisma than for their 'content'.*

The U.S. actually has a "poet laureate", it seems. Does anyone know his name? [Perhaps here on AWADtalk, but in the country at large?]

The current Poet Laureate-elect is [deleted]. He was born in New York in 1941 and has published six collections of his poetry, including Picnic, Lightning, and The Art of Drowning, and has another book coming out in September 2001. He's a Guggenheim fellow and a professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. He was appointed Poet Laureate on June 21, 2001, and will formally begin his term in October.

http://snipurl.com/gn5q

* In fact, charisma is the message, not content.

A hundred years ago and more, the only way you could experience a celebrity's 'charisma' was through his written word.

The charisma was in his words, that is, in the mind of the artist, not in his visual image.

Today charisma exists on the outside, not on the inside - a complete reversal of what was judged exalted in the human condition a hundred years ago.

* Lord Byron (1788-1824) - Byron (of Rochdale), George (Gordon), 6th Baron

The most notorious Romantic poet and satirist. Byron was famous in his lifetime for his love affairs with women and Mediterranean boys. He created his own cult of personality, the concept of the 'Byronic hero' - a defiant, melancholy young man, brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable in his past. "There's not a joy the world can give that it takes away / When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay, / 'Tis not on youth's smooth cheek the blush alone, which fades so fast, / But the tender bloom of heart is gone, ere youth itself be past." Byron's influence on European poetry, music, novel, opera, and painting has been immense, although the poet was widely condemned on moral grounds by his contemporaries.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/byron.htm