I have found that in the composition of sonnets the form itself, far from constraining me, gives me freedom. It enables me to say things with a power, a concentration, a fully embodied form, that a freer and perhaps more rambling exercise in vers libre could not attain. This paradox, that we find freedom through form, has been frequently attested and indeed explored by poets who have chosen to write in form, particularly in the sonnet form. Samuel Daniel, the Elizabethan and Jacobean poet who wrote a sonnet sequence called Delia, puts it very well in his A Defence of Ryme: “Ryme is no impediment to his conceit, rather gives him wings to mount and carries him, not out of his course, but as it were beyond his power to a farre happier flight.”

A visual artist, an architect, and a poet describe the freedom of coloring within the lines.