Babies Are Not Brought By

"love" Is So Short Of Perfect Rhymes That Convention Allows Half-rhymes Like "move". The Alternative Is A Plague Of Doves, Or A Kind Of Poem In Which The Poet Addresses His Adored Both As "love" And As "guv" - A Perfectly Decent Solution Once, But Only Once, In A While.

I've Not Been A Prolific Poet, And It Always Seemed To Me To Be A Bad Idea To Feel That You Had To Produce In Order To Get... Credits. Production Of A Collection Of Poems Every Three Years Or Every Five Years, Or Whatever, Looks Good, On Paper. But It Might Not Be Good; It Might Be Writing On A Kind Of Automatic Pilot.

The Lullaby Is The Spell Whereby The Mother Attempts To Transform Herself Back From An Ogre To A Saint.

Among Those Today Who Believe That Modern Poetry Must Do Without Rhyme Or Metre, There Is An Assumption That The Alternative To Free Verse Is A Crash Course In Villanelles, Sestinas And Other Such Fixed Forms. But Most... Are Rare In English Poetry. Few Poets Have Written A Villanelle Worth Reading, Or Indeed Regret Not Having Done So.

At Four Lines, With The Quatrain, We Reach The Basic Stanza Form Familiar From A Whole Range Of English Poetic Practice. This Is The Length Of The Ballad Stanza, The Verse Of A Hymn, And Innumerable Other Kinds Of Verse.