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We love a good sonnet, acrostic or villanelle.

Elizabeth Bishop’s wrenching villanelle, “One Art,” can be seen this way.

In “Missing Dates,” a haunting villanelle about helpless love and despair, William Empson writes: “Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills./ The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.”

Her own verse often drew on classical forms such as the villanelle, sestina, tritina and sonnet, and sometimes incorporated references to ancient mythology and medieval legend.

“It was almost like working within a received form, like a sonnet or a villanelle, to write into the context of the script,” he said.