**Note: I'm not a poet. I hardly ever write poetry, and when I do, it's usually because I've stayed up all night. However, this seemed like a very appropriate poem for Less Wrong. Not sure if it's appropriate as a top-level post. Someone please tell me if not.**
Imagine
The first man
Who held a stick in rough hands
And drew lines on a cold stone wall
Imagine when the others looked
When they said, I see the antelope
I see it.
Later on their children's children
Would build temples, and sing songs
To their many-faced gods.
Stone idols, empty staring eyes
Offerings laid on a cold stone altar
And left to rot.
Yet later still there would be steamships
And trains, and numbers to measure the stars
Small suns ignited in the desert
One man's first step on an airless plain
Now we look backwards
At the ones who came before us
Who lived, and swiftly died.
The first man's flesh is in all of us now
And for his and his children's sake
We imagine a world with no more death
And we see ourselves reflected
In the silicon eyes
Of our final creation
Yes, I do prefer, and I don't see any reason why I should pretend that jimrandomh meant that when he wrote "Some types of deviations are allowed, but some aren't". In any case, it seems scarcely credible that Swimmer963 is unaware that poetry has traditionally tended to have (perhaps even by definition) a lot of metrical regularity and that many people strongly prefer it to be that way, so on your reading jimrandomh's comment seems to convey little actual information. (And what actual information there was seemed to imply that all poetry should be iambic tetrameter, which is just ridiculous.)
Also: You might want to consider the possibility that Swimmer963 (or jimrandomh or T S Eliot) might have criteria of poetic merit other than "what will gain me status". (I find that a lot of the comments here about status, signalling, etc., give me the impression that their authors haven't appreciated how indirect a lot of this stuff is. Yes, a lot of human behaviour can be explained in terms of status-seeking; that doesn't mean that the people who do those things are actually, literally, seeking status. A lot of human behaviour can be explained in terms of trying to optimize one's reproductive success, but the humans behaving in those ways are often going out of their way to avoid actual reproduction. The same goes for status.)
[EDITED to add: Those remarks about status often seem to me like very clear examples of status-seeking behaviour themselves. "See how much more sophisticated I am, seeing through what Picasso might have said about beauty or artistic integrity to the status-seeking core beneath."]
"In any case, it seems scarcely credible that Swimmer963 is unaware that poetry has traditionally tended to have (perhaps even by definition) a lot of metrical regularity and that many people strongly prefer it to be that way, so on your reading jimrandomh's comment seems to convey little actual information."
Apparently I was more unaware than I thought. Almost all the poetry I've read recently doesn't rhyme or fit into iambic pentameter, to the point that when I read poetry that does, it almost feels weird. (Granted, a lot of what I read is medieval and translated into English from Latin. Maybe it rhymed originally.)