In a long-ago letter to a friend, Edwin Arlington Robinson recalled his boyhood struggles to become a poet. Over the past 20 years I’ve cited that letter several times, and now cite it once again.

As a teenager in the 1880s, he wrote, “Time had no special significance for a certain juvenile and incorrigible fisher of words who thought nothing of fishing for two weeks to catch a stanza, or even a line, that he would not throw back into a squirming sea of language where there was every word but the one he wanted.

“There were strange and iridescent and impossible words that would seize the bait and swallow the hook and all but drag the excited angler in after them, but like that famous catch of Hiawatha’s, they were generally not the fish he wanted. He wanted fish that were smooth and shining and subtle, and very much alive, and not too strange, and presently, after long patience and many rejections, they began to bite.”

Robinson probably would not be ranked today among the great poets of his time, but he won three Pulitzers in the 1920s and his short pieces still compare favorably with anything from his contemporaries. Every serious writer has shared Robinson’s experience. We fish for words – and we constantly throw back the words we don’t want.

All this came to mind a few days ago. For no good reason, except that musing beats hard work, I fell to musing on that literally pedestrian verb, “to walk.” It means, of course, “to advance by steps; to move along on foot; to travel on foot at a moderate speed or pace; to proceed by advancing the feet alternately so that there is one foot on the ground in bipedal locomotion …”

How many verbs deal with “bipedal locomotion”? A yellow tablet was close at hand. In a trice, 80-odd verbs quickly surfaced. My muse failed to reveal any form of bipedal locomotion beginning with the letters q, x or y. The only “k” verb was “to kick,” as in “a cop kicked down the door.” The only “o” was “ooze,” as in “Count Dracula oozed into the library.” The only “i” was “inch,” as in, “The daredevil inched along the high wire.”

Otherwise, the musing was a waltz. Idlers amble. Teenagers bounce, bound or bolt. Infantrymen charge. Quarterbacks dash and dart. Subway passengers elbow their way to a seat. Mountain climbers edge along a cliff.

A felon flees; a flirt flounces. A dancer glides, a golem galumphs, and a merry widow gallivants. We hustle, we hoof it, we hop. We jump and jog. Depending upon the circumstances, we may lunge, lurch, lope, leap or just lumber along. We meander, we mince, we mosey, we march. We nudge our way through a football crowd.

A plethora of “p’s” popped onto the pad: A band parades, a halfback plunges, an expectant father paces, a weary soldier plods and a pushy fellow pushes. Naturally, we race, run, roam, rush and roll. Indeed, in the realm of bipedalism, we may rock and also roll.

The “s” variations on “to walk” run on and on: Our hero may stride, stroll, strut, skip, saunter, shamble or shuffle. A villain slinks, a drunk staggers, a Texan swaggers. Conga dancers snake along. Graduates step forward. Runners sprint. We slog, we sidle, we stumble.

For “t” variations, our fictional characters may trot, trudge, tiptoe, tread or tramp. They may even traipse, defined as “to walk or travel about without apparent plan or purpose.” The verb dates from 1647. That is all you need to know about “traipse.”

The point of all this musing lies in the poet’s metaphor. Half a million fish are swimming in our English sea. The careful writer will want to distinguish a lurch from a stagger, a plod from a slog, a dash from a sprint. Our fishing expeditions are often frustrating, maddening, exhausting. But now and then, when we net that perfect fish, writing is pure joy.

James Kilpatrick is a syndicated columnist.