After the Psalms had been translated into English in prose, people found that these proses were difficult to sing or to enchant in the church. In Hebrew they were definitely "songs", lines supposed to be uttered with music. But the Hebrew orginals didn't follow the rhythmic structure in the way that English poetry did. Therefore, some translators/scholars attempted to create poems that were playfully engaged with the Psalms. In the 1560s, Hopkins produced such a work, putting Psalms into common measure. But the quality of that work was so poor that there were over 200 poets in the following 17th century trying to did the Psalms justice with their own versions. Philip Sydney and Mary Sydney were at the forefront of that trend. They wrote their poems in Heterometric stanzas, that is, they invented a new pattern every time they made a poem out of the Psalms. Their works would not be formally published until the 18th century, but their manuscripts were popular enough. John Donne, for example, was an eager student of them. Centuries later, Yeats also learnt a lot from them.