Bruce,

I am afraid your correspondent missed the whole story completely, and substituted in its place an imaginary rationale to suit his own prejudice.

I have wrangled sonnets and lettered rhyme schemes, and I have wrestled with "blank" (whatever that is meant to mean) forms as well; and of the two, I think the blank forms are much harder to work through. THe variables are huge and subtle. It could just as well be argued that formal rhyme schemes are for lazy poets who rely on prefabricated structure to do the hardest part of their work for them.

A