Clever as the circumstance demanded. As a device, constraint breaks habits into halves. It makes language superselective, hyperconscious, and surprising for incomprehensible reasons. It binds the stronger hand to strengthen the weaker. It cultivates our inner awkwardness.
Wordsmiths use constraint as the midwife to invention, and always have.
For figures like Tennyson and Petrarch, rhyme-scheme and meter gave form to color, order to chaos. I suggest scrolling your speech across the marquee of your 'inner cinema' before you open your mouth. The eyes will see what the ears hear not. You'll switch into Spanish and French, slip and curse, coin words like 'unfun' and 'anality,' and forget how to construct simple English sentences even after the game is long finished. Omit the present tense, or the first and second person, and what you get is linguistic origami, where all orientation is lost in a tangle of first names and future perfect.