It may be that a poetic form as venerable as the sonnet does not especially need new celebration. Poets still write sonnets, after all – even if to some the form may seem antiquated, oppressive, or just plain uninteresting. And the sonnets of centuries past are still read, studied, and appreciated, from Petrarch to Shakespeare, and on through the Romantics and the Moderns. There are popular and beloved sonnets that nearly everyone has read and still remembers, at least in name: Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” that begins “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”, Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways…” The list could go on. The sonnet is not in danger of being forgotten.

Nevertheless, however little the sonnet may require my services, I am going to set down a few strong words in its favor. I happen to feel – in the most personal and nonjudgmental manner, naturally – that fourteen lines of end-rhymed iambic pentameter constitute the highest form that the long tradition of Western verse has yet produced.

I am only an occasional poet, and not an especially serious one. I don’t read nearly enough poetry to learn from others what I should. I don’t even read many sonnets. But I did pick up a book recently that bears mentioning: The Art of the Sonnet (2010), edited by Stephen Burt and David Mikics. It is an anthology of one hundred sonnets, arranged in chronological order starting with the earliest adaptations of the form to the English language. Each sonnet is accompanied by a short interpretive essay by one or the other of the editors. The collection is wonderful. It got me thinking about why I like sonnets. And why I write sonnets – why, in fact, when every few years I am overtaken by a sudden bout of poetic fever, I come out the other end with almost nothing but sonnets.

Many poets find the sonnet form difficult. But for me, it is the less superficially demanding forms that lead to frustration. The lack of structure throws me into quandaries. I don’t know when to stop: when a metaphor has become ungainly or overgrown, or how many metaphors is one too many; whether this or that nuance of feeling should be worked in, or saved for another poem; at what line or stanza the reader is likely to start fidgeting or wondering what might be for dinner. The sonnet form simplifies things. It is short. The poet cannot ramble on: he must economize, figure out precisely what he means to say. And the sonnet is well-suited to a direct, first-person voice. The poet can simply speak his mind, to the reader and to the universe.

The world is fortunate that not all poets quail as I do in the face of the formless void. However, I do think there is a larger point to be made here. So many of the social structures that order our lives – the institutions under which we labor and are supposed to learn and grow, from family to school to work – really are oppressive and confining. We may react with a visceral rejection of all constraint: if only we could shake off these chains, we would be liberated! But this opposition between form and freedom is a false one. In truth, structure – of the right kind – is the indispensable foundation for any kind of freedom worth having. Without a skeleton the human form would crumple into a hapless puddle.

I don’t need to dwell on this point because so many others have. I first heard it expressed in connection with poetry by Wendell Berry, poet, farmer, and official state curmudgeon of Kentucky. In his 1982 essay “Poetry and Marriage”, Berry wrote: “To have a life or a place or a poem that is formless – into which anything at all may, or may not, enter – is to be condemned, at best, to bewilderment…A set verse form can, of course, be used like a cookie cutter or a shovel, including and excluding arbitrarily by its own rule. But a set form can be used also to summon into a poem, or into a life, its unforeseen belongings, and thus is not rigid but freeing – and invocation to unknown possibility.”

Form is the reality, hard and unforgiving, that punctures our illusions and says, “no, you cannot do it that way – try yet again.” Grappling with form is one way for us to overcome our poetic narcissism: it brings us out of ourselves, and into the world. If throughout this struggle we are able to remain active and alert, we embark on a process of discovery. Words begin to yield up unexpected sounds and shades of meaning; they become linked in ways we had never before considered. In the tension between poet as acting subject and poem as resisting object, there opens up a space of creative freedom.

For me, the sonnet form is especially freeing. It turns out to be the ideal frame for what is often my aim in writing a poem, and what I presume be an important function of poetry and art in general. This is, first of all, to express a specific and complex feeling; and to do so in a manner that is at once particular and universal, so that concrete images create a passage through which the reader can enter into a realm of potentially shared human experience. But more than this, the point is to reflect upon this feeling, this special way of responding to the world: to say something definite about it.

Fourteen lines are long enough for this task, and not a line too long. Moreover, the internal fractures within the two prototypal sonnet rhyme schemes are well-suited to capturing the convolutions of reflective thought. The Petrarchan division between octave and sestet creates a dramatic turn: the first eight lines set the stage, drawing the reader into a universe of the poet’s creation; but no sooner has he been thus acquainted, he is surprised, for the six lines following the volta introduce some new element or mood, subtly or abruptly turning this universe inside out.

In this way the poet may first show us how the world appears to him, then tell us what he thinks of it. This pattern is well illustrated in two thematically-related sonnets by William Wordsworth and Robert Frost. The octave of Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us” evokes the spiritual desolation of early 19^th century industrial England: “we are out of tune” with Nature – and, one suspects, with our own true human nature. The sestet reveals Wordsworth’s response: “Great God! I’d rather be/A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;” one might then at least take comfort in imagining “Proteus rising from the sea;/Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”

Frost’s sonnet “Design” is a very different response to a world – and a very different world – from which God appears absent. In this case, the octave paints a gruesome and incongruous picture: a fat white spider sits on a white flower, devouring a white moth. The scene inspires horror and fascination: “Assorted characters of death and blight/Mixed ready to begin the morning right.” Then, after the volta, the poet’s insistent, questioning response: what brought these “ingredients of a witches’ broth” together? If some powerful hand is at work in nature, it is not a benevolent one: “What but design of darkness to appall? –/If design govern in a thing so small.”

Like the Petrarchan turn, the Shakespearean couplet encourages reflection and dramatic effect. The couplet follows upon three quatrains, for which it may serve as a summary or epigram, but often it concludes the sonnet in unexpected ways: it evaluates, qualifies, even reverses what has gone before. A recurring pattern in Shakespeare’s own sonnets will serve as illustration. The poet asserts the transience of human life and beauty, including that of the young man who is the object of his adoration; but then in the couplet he proclaims his own power, as poet, to preserve this beauty forever. So for instance, in “Sonnet 65”, the quatrains ask: “Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea” can withstand the ravages of time, “who his spoil o’er beauty can forbid?” The couplet answers: “O none, unless this miracle have might,/That in black ink my love may still shine bright.”

The couplet may be more jarring. One of my favorite poems in the above-mentioned anthology is Charlotte Smith’s “Huge vapours brood above the clifted shore”. The quatrains envelop the reader in an obscure, atmospheric nighttime seascape, with faint ship-lights “Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land/Mislead the pilgrim;…” But the couplet reveals that we have been drawn into an elaborate metaphor: “…such the dubious ray/That wavering reason lends, in life’s long darkling way.” If the sonnet is a monologue, it is not a dull one. The speaker is not idly relating a story or saying what is on her mind: she is cogitating, perhaps arguing within herself, engaged in some inward moral struggle or discovery.

The sonnet’s theatrical character is enhanced by its meter: iambic pentameter. The lilting rhythm – da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum – lends to the poem a song-like quality (“sonnet” means “little song”) that builds up a dramatic tension, and at the same time opens the way to catharsis. It pulls the reader along, while still preserving that all-important ritualistic distance between the reader and the content of the poem – making it safe to enter into this content fully, but vicariously, without fear of being overwhelmed. When I begin to write a sonnet I often know precisely what feeling and thought it is that I am going for, striving simultaneously to let loose and to contain. The challenge is to do so accurately and vividly, within the allotted space and the required rhythm – and, of course, satisfying the strictures of some kind of rhyme scheme.

This necessity of rhyming – not everyone agrees that it is a necessity, I know, but I can’t help feeling that non-rhyming sonnets are kind of a cheat – imposes its own special kind of discipline. Many rhyme schemes are possible, and some are quite innovative, so one sets out with great flexibility – but once the pattern has been chosen and the writing begun, the execution can become increasingly tricky. In my experience, this difficulty, and the alternately playful and agonizing mental contortions that result, perform a specific and crucial function. They guard against a certain poetic self-indulgence that I, at least, am prone to when working with looser forms.

In writing a poem one is often revealing something that is, one feels, profound, possibly painful, and which seldom finds direct expression in the normal run of social discourse. A temptation arises to emote with abandon; to make the paper, and the reader, into the confidant whose interest and sympathy are taken for granted, who should never judge, only listen. The results can be embarrassing. But the strictures of a strong rhyme scheme raise a barrier to recklessness. This is not to say that there are no melodramatic or weepy sonnets – far from it. But the rigorous formal demands at least make one think twice, or a dozen times, about what degree of effusion is appropriate to the occasion.

Writing a sonnet can feel something like solving a puzzle. To say what one wants in language that is natural, not awkward or forced, while remaining within the constraints of rhythm and rhyme and sacrificing nothing of one’s intended meaning, is the most difficult part of composition – and when achieved it is a source of great satisfaction. Of course, what sounds contrived is partly a matter of personal taste. I for one do not shy from occasionally using poetic expressions that have faded from everyday speech. I will happily toss in a ‘ ‘Tis’ or an ‘Alas!’ when I judge this to be warranted, although I am sure it must strike some ears as old-fashioned or pretentious. I don’t care. For me, it isn’t even really a matter of style. There simply isn’t any modern exclamation that captures the full sense of ‘Alas!’, but often this is precisely how I feel. ‘Oh shit’ doesn’t cut it.

Sonnets can be puzzling, not only in the writing but also in the reading: untangling, decoding, teasing out compressed meanings and metaphors. But this obscurity, when it exists, should not be a frivolous trap laid by the author. Obscurity may be mistaken for profundity, but this is poor art: a good poet does not frustrate his reader’s efforts at comprehension without good reason. Nonetheless, legitimate difficulties can arise in trying to grasp that very specific shade of meaning the author is trying to communicate – especially if one has never felt that particular feeling oneself. It is not merely grief: it is grief mixed with guilt at having momentarily forgotten the lost beloved; tempered by reluctant awareness that this is the natural course of things; and tinged with horror that the world should work in such callous ways.

A sonnet is like a letter sent by the poet, across time and space, across the barriers that divide us by culture and gender and so on, and across the boundaries of each individual’s solitary experience – challenging the reader to search within herself for what is universal, or potentially so. It says: have you felt this way? If not, can you imagine it? And have you considered it like this? To do so requires the summoning and exercise of powers both emotional and intellectual. It makes us into fuller human beings: more responsive, more courageous, more sympathetic, more alive.

Such is my celebration of the sonnet. Others, I am sure, regard this form with affection for different reasons. And others will continue to prefer different forms, or none at all. Maybe the sonnet just happens to be well-suited to people and poets of a particular temperament and character, melancholic and intensely self-reflective. No doubt writing sonnets is not for everyone. But, in the spirit of universality, I hope that I have been able to convey something of the possibilities contained in this powerful poetic form.