Poets are often disregarded as the people who live in imagination and are incapable of portraying the actual pangs of life. This notion prevails even among the unexpected strata of the graduates (of literature) is indicative of their conformity with the established norms of their society as well as the context they lack when it comes to the vastness of poetry as an eminent component, not just in literature but in real life.
Poetry is everywhere, not just in literature (in the traditional sense). Apart from accompanying the melodies, it holds its significance in religion as well through Hamd and Naat and in Shia culture through nohas, qasaid and marsiyat. Poetry is also used to put the crying babies to sleep through the lullaby sung in the gentle voice of a mother. In fact, poetry has been the medium of narration from the Grecian haydays when the dialogue of a play was rhymed with the previous line till the Elizabethan Era when Shakespeare and Marlowe wrote their flagship and language-defining plays, not in prose but in blank verse (for the most part).
So who is a poet, or more specifically, what makes a poet, a poet? The pioneer Romantic Wordsworth defines a poet as a "man who speaks to men... endowed with more lively sensibility." Sensibility here means the emotional intelligence of a poet that makes him empathetic. But his vision of poetry was more focused on it being an outlet for "powerful emotions" to overflow. For Frost, a poet is a person experiencing a permanent "condition" of being, rather than someone practicing a mere "profession". But Emily Dickinson's definition of a poet is more adjacent to that of a "vulnerable" painter who paints the "moment that is hushed." In other words, s/he becomes the voice for those whose concerns are not raised/noticed by the masses.
Poetry has an appeal that prose cannot match. We are drawn more towards the rhythm and the rhyme than a free-flowing wall of text. It is the subject matter of the poetry common among the locals that has carried the notion of poets being imaginists and living in their own world. Such as them remembering the loss of their love. But there have been poets, both within us and from the outside who have shed light on the plight of the humanity. Such as these lines from William Blake,
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!"
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep. (The Chimney Sweeper)
These lines paint a very dismal picture of the early days of industrial revolution in United Kingdom when children, without their will, were forced to clean the chimneys and were subject to worse living conditions. Or take a look at another stanza from another poem,
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child:
But I am black as if bereav'd of light. (The Little Black Boy)
These lines show a grim reality of the division between the working class and the privileged class, both in the time of the industrial revolution and the one that persists here. English Literature is full of this realistic depiction but our local literature is no exception. Shakir Shujja Aabadi needs no introduction, and he also became the voice of the working class:
Ghareeb koon kain ghareeb keete, ameer zado jawab dewo.
Unlike Blake, whose callout was passive, Shakir's callout for the dismal condition of the working class has been direct and he holds the elites responsible for the ordeal among the ones, without whom, the privileged would not be enjoying their privileges.
Poets, as a whole, do not live in imagination. Their process of composition sure runs through imagination, but their composition represents the pains of the common man. Imagination is a part of the poetic process. The core point of contention among the masses is the subject matter of the poems floating around. But this is just a small window to the vastness of poetry as an integral element in Literature.
