"Hillyer says it can’t be varied; but that’s because he can’t think of any way to vary it."
William Carlos Williams said that; he was talking about the iamb in the 1950s.
da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM
“Let our iambs be of granite," Robert Hillyer warned a fellow traditionalist who was wavering, "and we need not heed the pulpwood words of our bedevilers.” And (in the same letter): "[F]orget the foes of poetry. It is better to make our turrets impregnable than to make sorties on unprofitable territory."