The sestina is largely a 19th century phenomenon in the U.K. and a twentieth century phenomenon in the United States where it was quite possibly one of the five most popular strict verse forms in use in-cluding the sonnet, iambic pentameter blank verse, the villanelle, and Sapphics as well.
In the twentieth century Algernon Charles Swinburne picked up Sidney’s torch; he wrote a double sesti-na titled “The Complaint of Lisa”; he rhymed it abab, turning its stanzas into Sicilian sestets and increasing the difficulty of the form. Swinburne’s poem titled “Sestina” (many poems bear this title) rhymed ababab which turned its stanzas into Sicilian sestets and increased the difficulty of the form, but some of the earliest French and Italian sestinas also rhymed, so these were not really what might be called “experiments.”
Edmund Gosse, a contemporary of Swinburne, also wrote a poem titled "Sestina," and, as sometimes was the fashion, he italicized the teleutons. Thus, experimentation with the sestina is a long-standing tradition in the history of the form, as it continues to be today, a fact that may well explain why manypeople have used it and its permutations last century and this. However, neither of the great Americanformalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson, wrote sestinas, though both used other traditional forms, Frost notably in “Stopping by Woods on a Snow Evening,” an interlocking rubaiyat, and Robinson in “The House on the Hill,” a villanelle.
However, not long after the turn of the 20th century their contemporary, Ezra Pound, returned to the dramatic mode of Sidney and wrote a monologue, "Sestina: Altaforte"; this, together with his "Sestina for Isolte," and “Paysage Moralise” by the English poet turned American, W. H. Auden, set off a steady trickle, if not a flood, of traditional and experimental sestinas in America.