Nobody Really Knows Whether They

At Somewhere Around 10 Syllables, The English Poetic Line Is At Its Most Relaxed And Manageable.

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.

My Feeling Is That Poetry Will Wither On The Vine If You Don't Regularly Come Back To The Simplest Fundamentals Of The Poem: Rhythm, Rhyme, Simple Subjects - Love, Death, War.

Considering The Wealth Of Poetic Drama That Has Come Down To Us From The Elizabethan And Jacobean Periods, It Is Surprising That So Little Of Any Value Has Been Added Since.

"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.