villanelle
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
The confines of a structure make your brain work in a different way: How do I get this idea across in a sonnet or a villanelle?
From Los Angeles Times • May 11, 2026
In “Missing Dates,” a haunting villanelle about helpless love and despair, William Empson writes: “Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills./ The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.”
From Washington Post • Mar. 10, 2020
But it’s also, low-key, a villanelle, a rhymed 19-line form with two lines that repeat identically in different places throughout the poem and come together to form its closing couplet.
From Slate • Aug. 8, 2019
She’d fought to master the loss, writing seventeen quickly successive drafts of an exactingly structured villanelle, a form with origins in the French Baroque.
From The New Yorker • Feb. 26, 2017
“Mine have poetic meter. A villanelle, actually,” Beowulf added modestly.
From "The Long-Lost Home" by Maryrose Wood
Vocabulary lists containing villanelle
Literary Terms, Part I
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The Bell Jar
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Form & Symbolism and Allusion
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