Poetry = Math

I've spent several days trying to make heads or tails of poetic forms and techniques, and I gotta tell ya...poetry is a lot like math. And me no good at math. I start to read about scanscion, about meters, feet, and there are always numbers! Numbers! Numbers in poetry! Where was I in poetry class? I began scanning poems, but my eyes started to glaze. I tried to imagine writing a poem in hexameters, and my neural connections frizzled like a hair dryer with a cut cord. Ouch. It hurts. Thank God for Post-Modernism and "free verse." But I do have a newfound respect for poets who actually had to work at writing poetry. You'd really need a degree in algebra and logic to write like a Keats or a Burns, it seems.