Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.

One does not become a guru by accident.

Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate.

The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where "open form" or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term "heightened speech".

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.

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".

At somewhere around 10 syllables, the English poetic line is at its most relaxed and manageable.