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The monotony of a long heroic poem may often be pleasantly relieved by judicious interruptions in the perfect succession of rhymes, just as the metre may sometimes be adorned with occasional triplets and Alexandrines.

That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

To me, a poem that's in rhyme and meter is the difference between watching a film in full color and watching a film in black and white. Not that a few black and white films aren't wonderful. So are certain successful pieces of free verse.

As a writer given to the old formalities of rhyme and meter, I sometimes feel endangered these days.

I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.

The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.