Free Verse
Brace yourselves, Shmoopers: this is a poem about… poetry. There's a fancy word for this kind of poem—"meta-textual"—which just means that it's thinking about itself, even as it's being written. Great, amazing, stupendous, but what does this have to do with this poem's form, you may be asking?
Well, in a word: everything. This poem knows poetry, gang. It name checks a ton of poetic forms (triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, and ballads) and even uses the word "iambics" correctly in a sentence (3, 17). To top it off, our speaker is—according to the title—himself a poet.
So, what kind of wild, exotic form did Masters choose for this speaker-poet's discussion about poetic forms? Well, how about "d) none of the above"? That's right. This poem has no set form, no set rhyme scheme and no set rhythm. It's written in a style called free verse.
At the time of this poem's publication in 1916, this was kind of a big deal. Most of the poems that were popular at the time were written in complex forms with intricate rhythms (check out "The Waste Land" for one example). The poems in Spoon River Anthology, however, were not. They opted for the irregular patterns of spoken speech (after all, when was the last time you had a conversation in iambic pentameter)? This free verse style turned the critics' heads. That, coupled with the gritty realism of the poem's content, made Masters' poems a sensation.
But why, Edgar Lee, why did you choose such a form? The answer, dear Shmoopers, is right here in the poem itself. The speaker of "Petit, the Poet" laments the old, dusty, dried-up, formal poetry that repeats the same boring poetic ideas about love and roses. Instead, he's all for poets like Walt Whitman, who himself wrote in free verse.
In short, this poem is in the voice of dead poet who wishes he could have broken out of the tired, predictable patterns of poetry and pursued a more free and genuine form of the art. (Remind you of Masters himself much?) Luckily for Petit, he finally gets it right in this poem. Unluckily, he had to be dead before he got it right.