Mbo,

Gack!! I am horrified that the situation in the world of music and entertainment should be have fallen to such a low point as that you wouldn't know that you are a "composer"--

This is what the person who writes the melodies is called--and the fact that you don't write lyrics is not important--you join the ranks of such famous persons as Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Kurt Weill, Duke Ellington, Leonard Bernstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber--as to setting poetry to music, this is what composers have done for years--Beethoven's "Song of Joy" at the end of the Ninth Symphony, is a poem from Goethe--The greatest of all song composers was Hugo Wolfe, who wrote unbelievable melodies to great poems from the likes of Heine and Goethe-

I am in kind of a bad mood, and you will have to forgive me for being extreme, but I think you have been cheated by the ingnorant clods who pass themselves off as educators, because you were never taught about any of this--the garbage mongers who write for the newspapers and television are continually shoving personalities and celebrities in out faces and never acknowledge anything about the way that art is created, and this makes passive consumers out of everyone--no one lets you know how things are created, or what the language is, so that you don't recognize the talent in yourself--

A song is a combination of lyrics and music, and many, if not most songs, have lyrics from one person, and melody from another(sometimes even more people are involved), although they are not always in the room together--

When you get tired of writing music to old poems, you can look around to find someone with a notebook full of poetry and go to work on that--don't even worry about performing--if you write something good, there are plenty of people who will want to perform it--