I don't know. I spent one memorable night reading all of
Shakespeare's sonnets and it remains for me a peak experience, so
exciting. Form means nothing outside the question of specific
execution.
What about intellectual shapeliness, say, as in Paradise Lost or Gavin
Selerie's hugely impressive (and huge) tome Le Fanu's Ghost? (Some
poems available
herehttp://www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/selerie/gs1.html but hard to
see the whole book's shape). Mandelstam described the Divine Comedy,
if I remember rightly, in terms of architecture, as a huge cathedral.
When I am writing novels I spend a lot of time brooding about their
structure: if I can't solve the structural riddle, I can't write the
book. (This has nothing to do with plot). Ditto if I write a work for
theatre. Or a longer poem. At the moment I am struggling with the
structures of poetry collections. Structure seems the same to me as
argument made material. Didn't Aristotle say something similar? Any
thoughts?
All best
A
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