Most serious readers of poetry carry around a set of templates in their brains—prototypes

of the Italian and the Shakespearean sonnets—against which all new sonnets are measured and evaluated.

(The teenager who falls in love with poetry by way of Frost or Millay or cummings or Keats doesn't know it,

but he or she has begun to construct internal measuring devices for a lifetime of reading lyric poems.)

Most of us have no comparable inner templates for, say, the sestina or the pantoum or the ghazal;

we haven't read a sufficient number of them, over a sufficient number of years, to fashion the same sort of mental apparatus.

If some poet were to commit against the sestina or the pantoum the sort of wholesale violence that cummings works upon the sonnet, the pummeled result would hardly be a pantoum or a sestina;

for these less familiar forms, we lack internal prototypes sufficiently robust to withstand such an onslaught.

The result is a paradox lying at the heart of much twentieth-century poetry:

the sonnet, although an old and in many ways old-fashioned form

(eighty years ago, T.S. Eliot questioned whether it was still viable),

proves particularly open to experimentation.

Or, to put it another way, more violence can be done to the sonnet,

with satisfying results, than perhaps to any other form.