Blevins published a full-length collection of poems, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, with Ausable Press in 2003. In this essay, Blevins uses Sappho's "Hymn to Aphrodite" to expose the importance of archetypal forms in the Western poetic tradition.

Many contemporary poets, critics, and scholars associate poetic form with metrical formalism, or almost exclusively associate verse itself with the most common, rhythm-based verse formulas in English (such as the sonnet). Such an attitude fails to recognize the importance of other, perhaps less obvious, structures or rhetorical stratagems for establishing patterns. Some important examples are the narrative, the catalogue, and the prayer. Without these, there could be no poetry in any language. As Joseph Campbell and other scholars have pointed out, human history is imbued with forms and structures that contemporary poets and other artists must rely on (as they need not the sonnet): even the descent and ascent depicted in...