…since the would-be quantitative poet was obliged to remember constantly the arbitrarily assigned “quantities” of the English syllables he chose to use, quantitative composition was a laborious academic-theoretical business, like all such nonempirical enterprises more gratifying to the self-congratulating practitioner than to the perplexed reader.

P. Fussel, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, Ch. 4: The Historical Dimension