<quatrain>
<line>Most serious readers of poetry carry around a set
of templates in their brains—prototypes </line>
<line>of the
Italian and the Shakespearean sonnets—against which
all new sonnets are measured and evaluated. </line>
<line>(The teenager
who falls in love with poetry by way of Frost or Millay or
cummings or Keats doesn't know it, </line>
<line>but he or she has begun
to construct internal measuring devices for a lifetime of
reading lyric poems.) </line>
</quatrain>
<quatrain>
<line>Most of us have no comparable inner templates for,
say, the sestina or the pantoum or the ghazal; </line>
<line>we haven't
read a sufficient number of them, over a sufficient number
of years, to fashion the same sort of mental apparatus. </line>
<line>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; </line>
<line>for these less familiar forms, we lack internal
prototypes sufficiently robust to withstand such an
onslaught.</line>
</quatrain>
