Numerous writers have tried to put their fingers on the full-spectrum norms-implosion in the country’s zeitgeist right now—the “great upheaval,” “decivilization”—but whatever you call it, there is a sense that Americans have sized up various Chesterton fences protecting political and cultural institutions and are spoiling to kick those suckers over just to see what happens.
I have found that in the composition of sonnets the form itself, far from constraining me, gives me freedom. It enables me to say things with a power, a concentration, a fully embodied form, that a freer and perhaps more rambling exercise in vers libre could not attain. This paradox, that we find freedom through form, has been frequently attested and indeed explored by poets who have chosen to write in form, particularly in the sonnet form. Samuel Daniel, the Elizabethan and Jacobean poet who wrote a sonnet sequence called Delia, puts it very well in his A Defence of Ryme: “Ryme is no impediment to his conceit, rather giues him wings to mount and carries him, not out of his course, but as it were beyond his power to a farre happier flight.”
Time and again I have had this experience of being carried “beyond my power” to “a far happier flight.” Something far more generative, more creative, is drawn from me in the very exercise of keeping to my self-imposed boundaries. The “bounding line,” as William Blake called it, is, in the very act of setting a boundary, concentrating the energy of the poem, like the banks of a river channeling the current that might otherwise dissipate in a tepid lake. The poet in Timon of Athens says poetry is “a current [which] flies each bound it chafes.” The very effort to channel it is what gives the current force, and of course the “bound,” the end of the line, or the turn of the sonnet can sometimes be overrun to great effect – the poem can fly the bound. Yet even that freedom to play with and stretch the rule is not an effect one can achieve without the self-imposed rule.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
How right Williams was, and how literally so.