It suggests that in order to come to understand poetry, at least from the perspective of the poet, one ought to gain some familiarity with meter and prosodic elements. A Critical Engagement, ed.
Literary etiquette demands that in mixed company poets pretend prosody is a dull subject.
Only pedants reduce art to arithmetic. Among their own kinds, however, poets find prosody anything but boring. I have watched poets argue intemperately over a detail of scansion and witnessed others exhaust an evening disputing theories of versification. The passions that rage over versification puzzle and even perhaps embarrass the common reader. Poets should be noble creatures of intuition, not car mechanics trading greasy-fisted blows over how to rebuild an engine.