Until you actually try and sit down and write, all you have is theory.

I'm worried this is going to turn into a bit of a chicken or egg scenario, but I think we're in agreement on this point. Metre, form, rhyme, symbolism, and phonetics are all theoretical until put into practice. That's self-explanatory. The theory is, in my opinion, what practice should rest on.

Perhaps "must" was hyperbolic clumsiness, but I want to stress the importance of these things since it's something I sincerely believe in and something that was neglected in the other posts. At the very least the two should be worked with simultaneously — such that "writing poetry is going to help him learn to identify these elements."

There are many rules we don't learn until we break them, or whose intricacies we aren't aware of until we push the boundaries.

I've distinguished between the more basic theoretical features of poetry and more complicated ones that engender serious thought and discussion. Are you arguing that there are basic concepts that have not been codified? Could you give specific examples?

Fur Elise and Ophelia are finessed final products that were only created after and by mountains of experimentation and mistakes. I feel like saying that "poetry demands artistry" and pointing out these examples, you are elevating poetry to a very high standard that presents it as mostly inaccessible.

I agree that no one's first anything is going to compare with Keats, or Shakespeare, or Beethoven, or Matisse, or the huge range of artists that you can no doubt come up with yourself. The point that I'm trying to make is that these great artists are examples of technical mastery as well as expression and that in them we can see that one shouldn't "cower from dissection and analysis"; there's a real pride in confronting these theoretical elements, that shouldn't be seen as "pseudery or exclusivity", head on.