Rhyme and rhythm are memory technology
Poetry is far older than writing, and for most of its life it was not read at all — it was spoken, chanted or sung, by people who had to hold it in their heads. Metre and rhyme are not decoration on top of the meaning. They are the error-checking that makes a long text survivable without paper: if a line has the wrong number of beats or fails to rhyme, you know you have lost something.
That is why the oldest surviving works everywhere are in verse rather than prose. Reading poetry silently to yourself off a page is a recent and slightly odd way to meet it, and the reason so much of it still improves enormously when read out loud is that the form was built for a listening ear rather than a scanning eye.
One poet gets a global dinner every January
On 25 January, in Scotland and wherever Scots have settled, people sit down to a supper at which a cooked sheep's stomach is carried in behind a piper, addressed directly in a recited poem, and then stabbed. The poem is Robert BURNS's *Address to a Haggis*, and the evening has run in more or less this form since his friends held the first one in 1801, five years after he died.
No other poet in any language has an annual dinner observed worldwide with a fixed running order. Burns is also why much of the English-speaking world sings a Scots song at midnight on New Year's Eve without knowing what the words mean — he collected and reworked *Auld Lang Syne* from older fragments.
Two things everybody gets slightly wrong
The first is the name. E. E. CUMMINGS did not legally change it to lower case and generally signed himself normally; the all-lowercase styling came from publishers and enthusiasts who had noticed how he handled capitals inside poems and decided to extend the joke to the cover. His wife objected to it for years.
The second is authorship. T. S. ELIOT's *The Waste Land* reached print roughly half the length of the draft he handed over, because Ezra Pound went through it cutting whole passages. Eliot kept the dedication to Pound as the better craftsman on every edition afterwards. A poem with one name on the spine has often had more than one pair of hands in it.
What the grid holds
The Romantics first — BLAKE, WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, BYRON, SHELLEY and KEATS, who was dead at twenty-five and convinced he had failed. Then the Victorians, TENNYSON, BROWNING, ROSSETTI and LONGFELLOW, who were read aloud in ordinary households in a way no poet is now.
Then the moderns pulling the form apart: WHITMAN abandoning metre altogether and printing the first edition of *Leaves of Grass* himself, anonymously, having set some of the type by hand; then YEATS, ELIOT, AUDEN, FROST, PLATH, HUGHES, LARKIN, NERUDA and Seamus HEANEY, who translated *Beowulf* and won the Nobel. Most of them are better heard than read, which is the argument of the whole page — and our poetry page has more on the forms themselves.