1. Form, in the sense of a completely predetermined poetic pattern, one that tells you how long the poem will be, in lines of how many syllables, with what kind of rhyme scheme: the news is that the sonnet is the only one widely used in English.
2. There are a few others borrowed from medieval French and Provencal poetry by the French Pleiaide poets and used later by the romantics. They came into English in late Victorian times. They usually involve mesmeric repetition and suited the purposes of the English symbolist and symbolist-influenced poets; that is, for a poetry in which the music was tuned up in a way that turned down the sense and had the expressive effect either of obsessiveness or formal hauntedness. They include the ballade, rondeau, sestina, triolet, and villanelle. The two that came into some use among modernist poets and contemporaries are the sestina—obsessive repetition—and the villanelle—formal hauntedness.
3. Sestina: Thought to have been invented around 1190 by the Provencal poet Arnaut Daniel whom Ezra Pound has translated. The form consists of six stanzas of six lines each, with a concluding three-line envoy. The sestina is usually unrhymed, but the six end-words in the first stanza are repeated in the following stanzas in a special order. The pattern is as follows:
Stanza 1: abcdef
2: faebdc
3: cfdabe
4: ecbfad
5: deacfb
6: bdfeca
Envoi: eca or ace
(with the other end-words bdf recurring within the lines)
Here is Anthony Bonner’s translation, literal, clunky, of an Arnaut Daniel sestina. If you know anyone who knows Provencal, you should get them to read it to you, if you really want the idea of what this is about, formally. (Actually, now, wonder of wonders, you can hear it sung in Provencal on Youtube, accompanied by a lute or cittern:
Lo ferm voler qu’el cor m’intra
The firm desire which enters
my heart cannot be taken from me by beak or nail
of that talebearer whose evil words cost him his soul,
and since I dare not beat him with a branch or rod,
I shall at least, in secret, free from any spying uncle,
rejoice in love’s joy, in an orchard or in a chamber.
But when I think of that chamber
which, to my misfortune, no man enters
and is guarded as if by brother or by uncle,
my entire body, even to my fingernail,
trembles like a child before a rod,
such fear I have of not being hers with all my soul.
Would that I were hers, if not in soul
at least in body, hidden within her chamber;
for it wounds my heart more than blows of a rod
that I, her serf, can never therein enter.
No, I shall be with her as flesh and nail
and heed no warnings of friend or uncle.
Even the sister of my uncle
I never loved like this with all my soul!
As near as is the finger to the nail,
if it please her, would I be to her chamber.
It can bend me to its will, that love which enters
my heart, better than a strong man with a sharp rod.
Since flowered the dry rod,
or from Adam came forth nephew and uncle,
there never was a love so true as that which enters
my heart, neither in body nor in soul,
And wherever she may be, outside or in her chamber,
I shall be no further than the length of my nail.
As if with tooth or nail
my heart grips her, or as the bark the rod;
for to me she is a tower, palace and chamber
of joy, and neither brother, parent or uncle
I love so much; and in paradise my soul
will find redoubled joy, if lovers therein enter.
Arnaut sends his song of nail and uncle
(by leave of her who has, of his rod, the soul)
to his Desirat whose fame all chambers enters.
S. E. Hickman, “Forbidden Desires: Arnuat Daniel, Mathematician and Troubadour”
Daniel is mainly known to us now because Dante Aligheri greeted him as “il miglio fabbro”—the better craftsman—in the Purgatorio, the phrase T. S. Eliot used when he dedicated “The Wasteland” to Ezra Pound, and in textbooks, which describe him as the inventor of the sestina. Pound and Eliot knew about him because in their youth there was a kind of romance of the troubadour poets in popular culture. There was a bestselling book about them and theater pieces, and there was Browning’s poem “Sordello.” It was a way—toward the end of the century—of popularizing the art-for-art’s-sake movement. The troubadours stood for art; they were gay and footloose fellows to be admired in opposition to what was perceived as the grimness of practical and Protestant industrial culture. Hence the young Pound’s capes and his pointed beard. His early poems like “Cino”—“Bah! I have sung of women in three cities, / But is all the same, / And I will sing of the sun”—were a sort of calling card for a modern idea (an anachronistically modern idea) of the poet as troubadour. Asked what he thought of the early Pound when he was an undergraduate, Eliot said, “I thought it was all cloak-and-dagger stuff.”
What this view of the origins of the sestina leaves out is craftsmanship, the thing that made Daniel “il miglio fabbor.” He was said to be a mathematician and a composer as well as a poet and in his day he was known for the musically complex end-rhyme and internal rhyming of his verse, a complexity of sound that gave him the reputation of being difficult to understand, which would have been another plus for Pound, who tried in some early translations to convey Daniel’s sound:
Aye, life’s a high thing,
where joy’s his maintenance,
Who cries ’tis a wry thing,
hath danced never my dance,
I can advance
no blame against fate’s tithing,
For lot and chance
Have deemed the best thing my thing.
The poems are convoluted enough that a modern scholar, Charles Jernigan, has interpreted a Daniel sestina as “mocking those formulaic troubadour sentiments by grinding them against the most disconcerting sexual reality and, by twisting them into the newly invented sestina form, he was also making fun of the difficult and complex types of verse, including his own” (Studies in Philology 71 [1974]). This proposes that the sestina was invented as a kind of parody of its own method. At the least there is a tension in the idea of it, from the beginning, between what was supposed to be the fine carelessness of the troubadour life and the meticulous craftsmanship the form required.
A few Renaissance poets had a hand at the sestina—the notable example is a double sestina by Sir Philip Sidney—and then it disappeared in English until it was revived by the Victorians, notably Swinburne. His sestina called “Sestina” can be found online. It was probably an instigation for Pound’s famous one—with a medieval subject—“Sestina: Altaforte,” about which Hugh Kenner tells a funny story. Pound was still trying to write like Browning when he was taken by Wyndam Lewis to visit the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in London in his studio. Pound read him “Sestina: Altaforte,” a poem implicitly praising the war-hungry restlessness of the mercenary Provencal princeling Bertran de Born, who made his living selling his army of peasants to the highest bidder. It was the age of Teddy Roosevelt. Pound’s poem begins with De Born addressing his jongleur:
Damn it all! All this our South stinks peace.
You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to music!
After Pound had left, Gaudier-Brzeska remarked to Lewis in his French-accented English, “A bold man, using the word ‘piss’ in a poem.” It was after that that he did the great cubist bust of Pound. The not-funny part of the story is that Gaudier-Brzeska enlisted in the French army when the war broke out and died in the trenches. After the war Pound would have a very different feeling—for a while at least—about the manly, martial spirit “Sestina: Altaforte” seems to celebrate:
There died a myriad . . .
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid . . .
“Sestina: Altaforte” initiates the twentieth-century sestina, and it is haunted for me by that story. The repetitions of the sestina get something of the character of De Born—the poem is a dramatic monologue as well as a sestina—and it is written with terrific vigor, but I find I can’t not see it as an early instance of Pound’s terrible judgment. So it doesn’t, except for its ingenuity, tell us much about the future uses of the form.
Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina” is another story. She uses her repeated words—house, grandmother, child, stove, almanac, tears—to get something about a profound stuckness in a child’s sense of the repetitions of daily life. One has to bring one’s sense of Bishop’s life to the poem, I think, to get the deep, suppressed melancholy of it, and of the way it is about orphaning and art:
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to her grandmother.
Bishop’s plain, almost flat language. She lost her father in infancy, her mother to madness by the time she was five.
It was probably John Ashbery in “The Painter” and “Farm Implements with Rutabagas in a Landscape” who launched the sestina as a postmodern idiom. In those poems the repetitions also seem to be about the repetitiveness of the world and seem also, like the account of Arnaut’s invention of the sestina, to be mocking poetry, or at least to be a kind of absurdist play, philosophical comedy about what language can deliver to us.
There’s been a recent explosion of sestinas, noted and analyzed by Stephen Burt in a 2012 essay, “Sestina! Or, The Fate of the Idea of Form.” He reads the phenomenon as a product of the teaching of creative writing and as a symptom of “diminished hope for the art,” a way “to emphasize technique, and to disavow at once tradition, organicism, and social or spiritual efficacy.”
For a form to which books on form give so much attention, there are remarkably few memorable poems in the English and American canon. Burt’s essay provides a long list of contemporary sestinas from which readers can find out what’s been going on with the form and decide for themselves about his assessment of them.
4. Villanelle: The villanelle came into French from an Italian folk song form. Five tercets rhyming aba, followed by a quatrain rhyming abaa; first line of the first tercet recurring as the last line of the second and fourth tercets, and third line of the initial tercet recurring as the last line of the third and fifth tercets, these two refrain-lines again repeated as last lines of the poem. It was usually written in English in iambic pentameter. If a(1) stands for the first line and a(2) for the second, the pattern looks like this:
a(1) b a(2)
a b a(1)
a b a(2)
a b a(1)
a b a(2)
quatrain: a b a(1) a(2)
See Austin Dobson, “Essays in Old French Forms,” Old World Idylls (1883).
It is a form that has produced at least these four quite powerful poems:
E. A. Robinson: “House on the Hill”
Dylan Thomas: “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”
Theodore Roethke: “The Waking”
Elizabeth Bishop: “One Art”
All four of them are metrical poems. There are experiments with free verse and the villanelle form. But there is some right marriage between the insistence of meter and the relentlessness of the rhyming that seems to give the form its power.
5. A note on the pantoum: The pantoum was originally a Malaysian song form. It was brought into French by an orientalist scholar and was picked up by the French symbolist poets and brought into English, along with the sestina and villanelle, by Austin Dobson. It is composed of quatrains in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next. It can be any length, but the last line of the last stanza is usually the first line of the poem, and the third line of the first stanza appears as the second line of the last stanza.
Originally the idea was that the first two lines of each stanza and the second two developed different themes concurrently, the two parts of the stanza being linked by sound (rhyme and meter or some kind of grammatical parallelism). It became attractive to postmodernists in the 1970s and 1980s because it expressed even more forcefully than the sestina or the villanelle relentlessly boring or mysterious repetition.
The most memorable pantoum I know of is Donald Justice’s “Pantoum of the Great Depression.” And in Paul Hoover’s anthology, Postmodern American Poetry, there are several recent poems:
David Trinidad: “Movin’ with Nancy”
Elaine Equi: “A Date with Robbe-Grillet”
6. And for another use of hypnotic repetition altogether, borrowed from the surrealists, I think, see Kenneth Koch’s “Sleeping With Women.” It has no specified form, just drowns you in anaphora and unpredictable, predictable return of the repeated phrase. A little of it goes like this:
Sleeping with women: as in the poems of Pascoli.
Sleeping with women: as in the rain, as in the snow.
Sleeping with women: by starlight, as if we were angels, sleeping on the train,
On the starry foam, asleep and sleeping with them—sleeping with women.
Mediterranean: a voice.
Mediterranean: a sea. Asleep and sleeping.
This must come out of Gertrude Stein’s “Lifting Belly,” that great hymn to sexuality, domesticity, and dailiness.