[Brian Allgar]

Originally Posted by Lewis Turco

Well, if you’re going to run any contest, shouldn’t there be some rules? If you’re going to run a sonnet contest, shouldn’t the tradition and rules of the sonnet form be honored? Not many people have earned an actual “poetic license” (many of my former students have done so), but I suppose that now there’s an Internet most would-be poets have a “virtual” poetic license and can call anything a “sonnet” or anything else they want to call it. But that doesn’t mean everything they “call” a sonnet actually is one.

Sounds reasonable to me. And Roger's neat inversion of your final sentence in no way invalidates it.

[Roger Slater]

Well, surely Alicia Stallings, Dick Davis, Robert Frost, Tim Murphy and many others who disagree with Lew's strict definition have earned their poetic licenses and the rest of us unlicensed onlookers therefore have license to adopt the point of view that strikes us as most useful. Personally, I think that this poem and many others that would flunk Lew 's sonnet test are sonnet- like enough to claim the name, though of course those who care about such things will promptly see that they are different in some ways from the the sonnet tradition as practiced in earlier eras.