Sonnet or haiku, which strict poetic form is actually the hardest to truly master?

[Tel92]

Poetry's most enduring fixed forms tend to impose extremely strict rules on length, structure and sometimes rhyme, and few forms have proven quite as enduringly popular across centuries and across completely different literary traditions as the sonnet and the haiku. The sonnet, most famously associated with Shakespeare and Petrarch, packs an entire argument, image or emotional turn into just fourteen tightly structured lines, typically built around a specific rhyme scheme and a deliberate volta or turn partway through, demanding that a poet build genuine complexity and nuance within a fairly generous but still firmly bounded amount of space.

The haiku, by contrast, compresses everything down even further into a traditional structure of just three lines, historically following a seventeen syllable pattern, forcing a poet to suggest an entire moment, image or feeling using an almost impossibly small number of words, with the very best examples relying heavily on precise, carefully chosen natural imagery and a kind of deliberate, meaningful silence around what actually gets left unsaid.

Defenders of the sonnet argue that fourteen lines still requires genuine structural and argumentative sophistication that a much shorter form simply cannot accommodate, while defenders of the haiku argue that saying something genuinely meaningful in so few syllables, without any room at all for filler or excess, is actually the harder and more disciplined technical challenge of the two. Which form do you think is actually the more difficult one to truly master?

[Marcus]

Haiku for me every time, purely because there is nowhere at all to hide. Every single syllable has to earn its place, whereas a sonnet at least gives you fourteen full lines to gradually build toward your point across a much longer runway.