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.

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.

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.

The lullaby is the spell whereby the mother attempts to transform herself back from an ogre to a saint.

I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.

A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.