Fussell on meter

“Because it inhabits the physical form of the very words themselves, meter is the most fundamental technique of order available to the poet. The other poetic techniques of order — rhyme, line division, stanzaic form, and over-all-structure — are all projections and magnifications of the kind of formalizing repetition which meter embodies. They are meter writ large.” (from Poetic Meter & Poetic Form)