How I long to live up to these expectations...

"Because free verse is like playing tennis without a net. And balls. It's not that poetry without meter and rhyme is bad poetry. It's that it is not poetry. It is what scholars once referred to as prose-- no matter how you chop it up on the page. Some of it is excellent prose, nonetheless, speaking where it should sing. And verse that does not sing cannot touch the heart for very long. It might for a year or two, or even a decade, but not for centuries."

-From The House Beautiful by Allison Burnett