Definitions of Form

Robert Hass, in the book for this course, A Little Book on Form, provides these definitions of form:

• One meaning of form that has currency has the meaning “traditional form,” which usually means the use of rhyme and meter.
• Another meaning is that it refers to one of a number of traditional kinds poems that apply particular rules of composition. As in “the sonnet is a form.”
• Another meaning is “external shape.”
• Another is “the arrangement and relationship of basic elements in a work of art, through which it produces a coherent whole.”
• The way the poem embodies the energy of the gesture of its making.