Poetry and Sports

If you just walk up a green with a golf ball in your hand and casually place the ball in the hole, you are not playing a bold and original form of golf; you are not playing golf at all.  The rules of any sport are apt to be unnatural -- it would be natural to tuck the basketball under one's arm and run with it, or to grab a soccer ball with one's hands -- but it is precisely this that makes the sport a sport.

The same holds true with poetry.  Rhyme, meter, alliteration, etc. are all as arbitrary and unnatural as the rules of American football, and different languages and cultures have different rules, as of course do different sports.  However, just as the rules make the sport, the rules make the poetry.  "Poetry" without rules is not poetry at all; it is typically just prose with oddly placed dramatic pauses.