Editing Villanelle (section)

== Effect ==
With reference to the form's repetition of lines, Philip K. Jason suggests that the "villanelle is often used, and properly used, to deal with one or another degree of obsession"<ref name="Jason 1980 p. 141">Jason 1980 p. 141</ref> citing [[Sylvia Plath]]'s "[[Mad Girl's Love Song]]" amongst other examples. He notes the possibility for the form to evoke, through the relationship between the repeated lines, a feeling of dislocation and a "paradigm for [[schizophrenia]]".<ref name="Jason 1980 p. 141"/> This repetition of lines has been considered to prevent villanelles from possessing a "conventional tone"<ref name="Strand et al. 2001, p. 8">Strand et al. 2001, p. 8</ref> and that instead they are closer in form to a song or [[lyric poetry]].<ref name="Strand et al. 2001, p. 8"/> [[Stephen Fry]] opines that the villanelle "is a form that seems to appeal to outsiders, or those who might have cause to consider themselves as such", having a "playful artifice" which suits "rueful, ironic reiteration of pain or [[fatalism]]".<ref name="Fry 2007, p. 228">Fry 2007, p. 228</ref> (In spite of this, the villanelle has also often been used for [[Light poetry|light verse]], as for instance [[Louis Untermeyer]]'s "Lugubrious Villanelle of Platitudes".<ref name="Cohen 1922">{{cite book |last=Cohen |first=Helen |title=Lyric Forms from France: Their History and Their Use |year=1922 |url=https://archive.org/details/lyricformsfromf01cohegoog |publisher=[[Harcourt Brace and Company]] }}</ref><ref name="French 2004 p. 147">French 2004 p. 147</ref>)

On the relationship between form and content, [[Anne Ridler]] notes in an introduction to her own poem "Villanelle for the Middle of the Way" a point made by [[T. S. Eliot]], that "to use very strict form is a help, because you concentrate on the technical difficulties of mastering the form, and allow the content of the poem a more unconscious and freer release".<ref name=ridler>{{cite web|title=Villanelle for the Middle of the Way|url=http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=1720|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060724074018/http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=1720|url-status=dead|archive-date=July 24, 2006|publisher=The Poetry Archive|access-date=7 February 2014}}</ref> In an introduction to his own take on the form, entitled "Missing Dates", [[William Empson]] suggests that while the villanelle is a "very rigid form", nonetheless [[W. H. Auden]]—in his long poem ''[[The Sea and the Mirror]]''—had "made it sound absolutely natural like the innocent girl talking".<ref name=empson>{{cite web|title=Missing Dates|url=http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=7503|publisher=The Poetry Archive|access-date=7 February 2014}}</ref>