One of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me (this on the telephone before any other words were spoken) was, "Stanford, I really like your poetry." The sentiment rather startled me: How often, anymore, do people like poetry? As I thought about it, of course, the more important question arose: when did poetry stop being likable? What led even the poet, Marianne Moore, to say, "I, too, dislike it"? One could say that it is clearly not the intent of war poems to be "likable," but insofar as such poems communicate their meaning clearly and powerfully, we are attracted to them, and take them into ourselves. And there is very little we take into ourselves that, in some curious way, we don't like. My philosophy of poetry is very simple: no tune, no lilt, no melody-no poetry. As the rhythm, in jazz, enables us to lower our defenses so that our ears can make sense of the succession of notes, so rhythm, in poetry, carries the meanings expressed; Frost called it "the sound of sense," and claimed that by the way he manipulated rhythm, he could make you believe almost the exact opposite of what his words were saying. (It is worth noting that the pace of all Western music never strays too, too far from the human heartbeat; there is a pronounced limit to how fast it can be, or how slow, and it is the human heartbeat that sets those limits.) My instinctual way of creating rhythm is derived from a) the use of a more or less iambic beat, and b) rhyme. The problem, of course, is that the combination of rhyme and iambic beat can quickly become monotonous, and worse, quickly deteriorate to singsong. I try to circumvent these pitfalls by interspersing non-rhyming poetry among the rhyming, and not using rhyme for the sake of rhyme, but for the sake of interest and pleasure. I believe Frost (and I make no secret of his influence on me) is correct in saying, "poetry begins in the nursery rhyme." T. S. Eliot pointed out that the first way a poem communicates is visually. That is the reason I cleave to traditional three-, four-, and five-line stanzas, and try to write in uniform line lengths. Not for me the indiscriminate long line followed by a very short line followed by a medium, so-so line followed by . . . and so on. In most instances, I capitalize every line of a poem; I simply cannot understand why so many poets capitalize their poems the way they would capitalize prose. What is the advantage? I want everything clean, accessible, and orderly. I am aware that this gives my poetry an old-fashioned look (and definitely does not arouse sympathy from editors of poetry magazines), but if it makes my poetry likable, it is a price I will willingly pay. Robert Penn Warren said "the greatest literature is that which appeals to the most people, and the most different kinds of people." But poetry has become a rather specialized art, for a needlessly specialized audience. Gone forever are the days when Lord Byron could sell six thousand copies of a book in one month, or ten thousand of another on the day of publication. Still, we take immediate and instinctive pleasure in lyrics drawn from the Great American Songbook; is there any reason we can't still derive immediate and instinctive pleasure from poetry?