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The Villanelle Revival

The villanelle form was first developed in France by the seventeenth-century poet Jean Passerat. However, it wasn’t until the mid-eighteenth century that the villanelle became popular among French poets. In 1844, the French poet and critic Wilhelm Ténint wrote a treatise that restored poets’ attention to the little-known villanelle. This French poetic form later became popular among British poets in the 1890s, when aesthetic formalism was all the rage. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, modernist poets increasingly rejected rigid poetic forms.

The villanelle fell out of use for half a century, achieving no notable place in English poetry until 1951, when the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas published “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Thomas’s poem proved hugely influential and sparked a minor revival of the villanelle. In the ensuing years, major poets like Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, and Elizabeth Bishop all tried their hands at the form. For these poets, the villanelle’s patterned structure of repetition provided an ideal form for exploring different kinds of obsession. Dylan’s poem, for instance, features a speaker who obsesses over his father’s death. Bishop’s poem similarly features a speaker who obsesses over the possibility of avoiding grief.

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