[John Isbell]

Hi Roger,

If you don't understand the question, how do you know you've answered it? A problem familiar to many a student in my experience. So, the saying goes that if all you've got's a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Or, take Goethe's heroine who knows her lover is planning to leave because he starts writing to her in French. Different formal choices impose different ways of looking at the world: writing an epic instead of a ballad not only makes what we say different, it makes the categories we think in different, likely also the human relationships, I would think this is non-controversial. Yes, we write limericks because we feel like it. But different girls, and different attitudes to women, inhabit a traditional sonnet and your proposed limerick about a girl from Nantucket. Again, I would think this is self-evident, and worthy of some sustained thought.

Hi Jane,

I like your David Anthony - thank you! And like Susan's key metaphor, i find your recipe metaphor intriguing. It's true, spaghetti and lasagne are not the same experience, and that lies in their formal choices more than their ingredients, like the difference between salad and ratatouille.
As to the narrowing or expanding of the universe of thought, I'd say this. Form guides thought, much as train tracks guide the train into the future. The tracks offer the train the chance to move at speed - a plus, we assume - but limit its scope of movement - a minus. So, form in its structure of repetition and variation imposes ways of thinking about lived reality. Mme de Stael calls rhyme "an image of hope and memory," for instance, and that seems exactly right.
Sarah-Jane devoted some space to this in her ghazal thread. The premise was that ghazals favor non-linear narratives, or a certain way of looking at cause and consequence, past, present and future. She added that sonnets favor a certain dialectical progression to resolution that dovetails nicely with a particular way of looking at the world - one that involves a volta in experience, for instance. I hope I am doing her thought justice here. But experience does not necessarily have voltas, nor is it necessarily dialectical.
There's a story I used to tell about a Zen koan and Winnie-the-Pooh's birthday to illustrate this point. But perhaps instead I'll stop here.

Cheers,
John

Update: Eeyore's birthday, actually. And Jayne, I wish you a speedy recovery!