To begin with, the basis of English poetry is rhythm, or, as some would prefer to call it, cadence. This rhythm is obtained by mingling stressed and unstressed syllables.

Central also to reading verse aloud is the handling of enjambment, ..the interplay of line-end and sentence-flow.

Every phrase can be a good lyric if it has the good rhythm.

Can there really be a form of verse where all that counts is the number of syllables in a line? No patterning of stress at all? What is the point?

Well, that is a fair and intelligent question and I congratulate myself for asking it.

Prose will be used for the more objective branches of writing- novels, plays, essays..Cadence will be used for personal, emotional, lyrical utterances in which the phrasing goes with a stronger beat and the words live together with an intense flame.

A poem releases itself, it does it with cadence.

Through breath, pace, and being present in the words themselves

The line is a way of thinking in poetry, by poetry..it paces the poem.

It will serve to show how articulated language comes into being. I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat meows . . . Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh. One shouldn't let too many words out. A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language.. .Dada is the heart of words.

We knew it was holy. Every sentence we cherished was sturdy and Biblical in its form, carved somehow by hand-dragged implement or slapped onto sheets by an inky key. For sentences were sculptural, were we the only ones who understood? Sentences were bodies, too, as horny as the flesh-envelopes we wore around the house all day.

A great verse can have a great influence on the soul of a language.

Verse is a set of specially related sounds, repeated aloud.

There is a natural physiological tendency to pronounce in one breath successive groups of rhythmic feet, and the rhythmic content in the average length of breathing can only be called a verse.

What good poetry and good prose have in common is vitality of rhythm .