Formalists and avant-gardes love sestinas for their ornate, maddeningly complicated rules of word repetition.
More than 800 years after its invention in medieval France, the sestina survives and thrives in
English. A fixed 39-line poetic form with of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three-
line stanza known as an envoi, tornada, or tercet, the sestina is the one form of poetry that poets from all camps agree can exist...
Related Subjects
Poetry