I have never been convinced that the parallels sometimes drawn between the formal properties of music and metrical writing – or, more generally, verse – are anything other than analogies. Of course, such analogies can be a stimulus to creativity, but so can – for instance – painting, architecture or the formal properties of a walk.
As to the original question, very rarely indeed I have written a poem in a set form or metre with the intention of writing in such a form or metre. Discovering the form, discovering the rhythm, occurs as part of the process of “discovering” the poem itself. For me, even where what I end up working towards is indeed a poem in a set form, form itself is usually much less important – much less to the fore in the process of writing – than matters such as tone, diction, the exploratory or open-ended nature of the evolving imagery and perhaps above all syntax, whose expressive subtleties I am constantly fascinated by.
Also, I very much like these well-known passages from Valéry:
The great painter Degas often repeated to me a very true and simple remark by Mallarmé. Degas occasionally wrote verses….But he often found great difficulty in this work….One day he said to Mallarmé: “Yours is a hellish craft. I can’t manage to say what I want, and yet I am full of ideas….” And Mallarmé answered: “My dear Degas, one does not make poetry with ideas, but with words.” – “Poetry and Abstract Thought" in Paul Valéry: The Art of Poetry, trans. by Denise Folliot (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), page 63.
Poetic necessity is inseparable from material form, and the thoughts uttered or suggested by the text of a poem are by no means the unique and chief objects of its discourse – but means which combine equally with sounds, cadences, meter, and ornaments to produce and sustain a particular tension or exaltation….If I am questioned; if anyone wonders…what I “wanted to say” in a certain poem, I reply that I did not want to say but wanted to make, and that it was the intention of making which wanted what I said…. – “Concerning ‘Le cimitière marin’” in Paul Valéry: The Art of Poetry, trans. by Denise Folliot (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), page 147.
Clive
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