In Rap, As In Most Popular Lyrics,

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.

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.

Poetry Carries Its History Within It, And It Is Oral In Origin. Its Transmission Was Oral.

An Aria In An Opera - Handel's 'ombra Mai Fu,' For Example - Gets Along With An Incredibly Small Number Of Words And Ideas And A Large Amount Of Variation And Repetition. That's The Beauty Of It. It's Not Taxing To The Listener's Intelligence Because If You Haven't Heard It The First Time Round, It'll Come Around Again.

The Basic Rhymes In English Are Masculine, Which Is To Say That The Last Syllable Of The Line Is Stressed: "lane" Rhymes With "pain", But It Also Rhymes With "urbane" Since The Last Syllable Of "urbane" Is Stressed. "lane" Does Not Rhyme With "methane".