And poetry is so much more than the rhymes: it could be that this person didn't really know English poetry as well as Russian poetry, or that he was more easily impressed by exotism. I read French natively and have been living in English for 10 years and can now read Snow Crash-like stuff, and English always amazes me more than French, just because it can be so much richer than I'll ever produce myself, stuck to my French roots.
Rhymes are like a little funny exercise in poetry to add some music, but really far from the goal, or so I hope. I feel it's one of the many inputs: you have the rhymes, the rhythmic internal divisions of the stanza, the symmetry between them across the text, and you can add lots of little funny meta-meaning by reversing meaning in two halves of two successive stanzas, stuff like that. A poem is just a text that does more than transfer information at the first level, but does it on many more. English, Russian or French, they can all do it.
So if I read at random this in English: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43844/she-walks-in-be... and this in French: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Contemplations/R%C3%A9pon... , I can feel a mysterious beauty in English maybe I can't feel in a French poem, while the French one explodes in meaning, makes me think more than contemplate.
Rhymes are like a little funny exercise in poetry to add some music, but really far from the goal, or so I hope. I feel it's one of the many inputs: you have the rhymes, the rhythmic internal divisions of the stanza, the symmetry between them across the text, and you can add lots of little funny meta-meaning by reversing meaning in two halves of two successive stanzas, stuff like that. A poem is just a text that does more than transfer information at the first level, but does it on many more. English, Russian or French, they can all do it.