I just want to say to all those of you who write poetry in English that you have an enormous advantage to the rest of us that compose in romance languages (Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, etc.), and all other languages that are mostly polysyllabic.
Here is the thing: your vocabulary is vastly monosyllabic and that allows you to write metrified verse that can still apprehend vast quantities of material inside ten-syllables lines.
I really believe that this freedom that few people perceive makes a lot of difference. For example, who could translate this Shakespearean line to any romance language using a ten syllable or even a twelve syllable line:
>Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes
Even the Alexandrine of the French (with twelve syllables) generally cant express as much thought and detail as the iambic pentameter line of English, and that mostly because a large quantity of English words are just one or two syllables long.
None of the romance languages can fill a regular sonnet with so much information as English. Take this, for example:
Design
Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.
Or this:
Sonnet 33, Shakespeare
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
user permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all-triumphant splendor on my brow;
But, out, alack! he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.
This angers me a lot. It is much harder to write poetry in Portuguese.