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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/3876
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Every time I try to write a poem I find myself incredibly stuck. It feels to me like poetry has so many different aspects- meter, structure, rhyming, lingual aesthetics (not to mention semantics), all crammed into a tightly confined structure (yes I know poetry can be very free style, but I'm interested in well structured, rhyming poetry)- that I can't possibly "optimize" them all simultaneously. It's like I can't achieve a satisfactory quality in one aspect without completely messing up the others: if I write a line that sounds nice, it'll be completely out of meter and will not rhyme with the rest, and I can't make it rhyme without giving up on that nice word I want to use, and if I try to fix the meter without changing the heart of the line then it will most likely stop making sense... It's just an endless struggle.

Do you experience these problems when writing structured poetry? If so, how do you handle them? What would you recommend that I do to start getting over this problem?

Original score: 6