A poetic form is an ordained pattern. It can be very modest:
There are numerous poems consisting of one couplet. It can be
quite formidable: The chant royal, a French form, is sixty lines
long and turns on a mere five rhymes. Form, for the poet, is a fur-
ther exaction beyond the exactions of syntax, rhythm, sound,
grammar, and word choice. The precision of form fascinates and
that no doubt is part of the reason why poets continue to write
sonnets and villanelles and sestinas and odes and ballades. A
form is explicitly a bequest from the past and to write in form is to
acknowledge a tie with countless others who gladly have ac-
cepted the rules that define how a certain sort of poem must be
constructed. To put one's own imprint on a form is a great chal-
lenge. The goad of form may elicit imaginings on the poet's part
that otherwise never would have occurred.

A meter is a rhythmic pattern; a stanza is a unit (sometimes
rhymed) of a particular number of lines. Both are instances of form in
the sense that the poem that incorporates meter and stanza is shaped
according to some specific dictates. Many poems are written in form
in a more overall sense: The poem as a whole has a specific pattern.
Human ingenuity knows no bounds as to poetic form: English-lan-
guage poetry possesses, for instance, forms that are (among other
lengths) five lines long, fourteen lines, nineteen lines, thirty lines;
forms that repeat end words; forms that repeat whole lines; forms that

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