In my opinion, a great formal poem should strike a perfect 50/50 balance between form and content. At least that's what I strive for personally. Some of my poems have been started without form in mind. Some of them have been started with a specific idea for length / meter etc. Most are in the latter camp, but when all is said and done, if you don't have the content to fill the form, it's just an exercise. And if you don't have form to rein in the content, it's just prose.

Again, it's my opinion. No facts were harmed in its formation, I promise you.

I don't think there is any one right place to start when writing. Most of the time I start with a line or even a phrase and then gradually build on it until I have some idea of a form it could fit. Sometimes the line arrives with an idea for the form it will fit. In a few cases, I have aspired to write in a particular form and then have waited for the idea to arrive that would fit it, or have just started writing lines to see if any would work. I often have an informal tally of my current obsessions, as well as lots of scraps of paper (or a computer file) with assorted phrases that have yet to find a poem. I take the ideas gladly, no matter where they come from. Of course, they don't all lead to finished poems.

Susan

What the poem says is its center. The form is merely the suit or gown it wears to the dinner party. (The few parties I attend are always formal.) I have never written a poem which is a contemplation on its own form. Anyone who so misinterprets my work, well there's a nether hell for the likes of same.

Ed,
Here's a Bukowski for your Roethke:

When the spirit dies,
the form appears.

Bukowski is a poor poet though. ;)

Susan's take on things sounds about right. Sometimes I start with an idea that is suited to a particular form and I mine for the words after. Other times it is pure intuition and force rather than form, the force of the impulse itself determining the form - Nemo's egg.

a sonnet is complexed

villanelles are obsessed

tet lines are music

tri lines are urgent

dimeter lines are spells

In the end I am a collector of images, emotions and insights. I arrange them as they arrange me - some poets write free verse, some formal. All of us are using words as vessels.

All things are bound into form, for only through form can spirit express itself. Without form, formlessness in moot; a spiral of pointlessness--

J

Pertinax

Let chaos storm!
Let cloud shapes swarm!
I wait for form.

Robert Frost

Usually poems, like speech, take shape in the doing. Whatever I start with, whatever subject or form, changes as I write or talk. I imagine it’s this way for most writers and talkers.

I understand Mary’s point about form as saying that the content of poems often doesn’t add up to much, as any paraphrase will show. Go through Petrarch’s or Shakespeare’s sonnets and paraphrase them: not much is left. The poem’s form—not just rhyme and meter, but phrasing, sentence structure, wordplay, etc.—is, in a certain (and not necessarily gobbledegooky) sense, what the poem is saying. Of course, if the content lacked passion or something that matters to people, the form wouldn't matter either.

Remembering that Yeats’s “Cuchulain Comforted” started with a journal entry, which he turned into terza rima (transforming it as he went), I searched online to find that journal entry, but it did not turn up. Instead, I found this from an article on Yeats by Eric Ormsby, referring to a book that reproduces Yeats’s working manuscripts:

What the drafts demonstrate most compellingly is that for Yeats composition did not entail the elaboration of “ideas;” indeed, all his ideas were conspicuously second-hand. Rather, the writing of a poem involved the discovery of a musical argument. The propositions of the poem to be written were inordinately clear (for at least one poem Yeats even wrote a prose summary beforehand); it was the music that remained to be discovered.

Amen, say I.

I'll see your Amen and raise you an Alleluia...

Andrew,

Eric Ormsby was one of my first mentors. At the time we were both on staff at McGill and he graciously agreed to read an early MS of mine. His eye and ear for "the real thing" in poetry is, IMHO, unmatched. Thank you for quoting that passage of his re the "musical argument". It's what I strive for as well. I also agree with Nemo and others that form, rather than being restrictive, is actually liberating.