Brief History of Stanza Forms in English

• The Birth of the Stanza: From Orality to Literacy
  

  • For oral (pre-literate) cultures, poetry serves a mnemonic function. It is its memory of events, customs, and belief systems. (Ong)

  • Some mnemonic devices used by oral cultures include:

    • lines of similar length, measure either by accents, syllables, or metrical feet.

    • sound patterns, such as rhyme, rhythm, assonance, alliteration, consonance.

    • rhetorical structures, such as lists, phrasal repetitions, enumerations, and so on. (Ong)

  • “The shape which a poetic stanza cuts in time was once, before the widespread use of printing, apprehended by the ear alone. In later times, the reader’s conception of stanzaic form has been both aural and visual. And now that we are fully accustomed to using printed texts for apprehending poems, our sense of stanzas has become a very complex act of mediation between what our eyes see and what our inner ears hear.” (Fussel)

  • Nonce forms are invented for a particular poem, while fixed forms are nonce forms that have been adopted by other poets.
  • Visual poetry is particular to writing and print, and is therefore less concerned with the aural component that is central to traditional or fixed forms.
  
  

• 1-line stanza or monostich: Anglo-Saxon Alliterative Verse

  • The Germanic origins of Old English lends itself for accentual prosody.

  • 4 stresses per line, 2 per hemistich, caesura in the middle of line, no rhyme.

  • Example:

  The Seafarer, translated by Ezra Pound

  May I for my own self song's truth reckon,
  Journey's jargon, how I in harsh days
  Hardship endured oft.
  Bitter breast-cares have I abided,
  Known on my keel many a care's hold,
  And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent
  Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship's head
  While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,
  My feet were by frost benumbed.
  Chill its chains are; chafing sighs
  Hew my heart round and hunger begot
  Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not
  That he on dry land loveliest liveth,
  List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,
  Weathered the winter, wretched outcast
  Deprived of my kinsmen;
  Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,
  There I heard naught save the harsh sea
  And ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries,
  Did for my games the gannet's clamour,
  Sea-fowls, loudness was for me laughter,
  The mews' singing all my mead-drink.

• 2-line stanza: Couplet

  • Emerges in Middle English period, after the Norman Conquest latinizes English. Accentual-syllabic prosody takes over, and the single line with strong caesura breaks into two lines emphasized by end rhyme.

  • The couplet emerges in 4-stress, 8-syllable, rhyming lines (as in Chaucer’s “Romance of the Rose”)
    

    Ful gay was al the ground, and queint,
    And powdred, as men had it peint,
    With many a fressh and sondry flowr,
    That casten up ful good savour.

• The couplet stabilizes into rhymed iambic pentameter, aka. the heroic couplet, which will be discussed by Ahiesha and Lidsay.
• When the lines are closed by punctuation or strong syntactical integrity, they are called closed couplets. They tend to be rhetorical in nature, lending themselves well to satire and commentary.
• When the lines are enjambed (aka open), they are called closed couplets. They are more effective for narrative poems.

• 3-line stanza: Tercet, Triplet, Terza Rima, Haiku
  
• Types:
• Tercet is the general name for a 3-line stanza, usually with an ABA or ABC rhyme scheme.
  
• Triplet is a tercet with an AAA BBB CCC rhyme scheme.

• Terza Rima is an Italian tercet form that has the following structure: ABA BCB CDC DED and so on. It is used by Dante in the Divine Comedy and Shelley in "Ode to the West Wind."
  

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,    
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing        

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red.             
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,               
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed . . .               

• The Haiku is a Japanese tercet that will be discussed by Karen and/or Viviana.

• The tercet was used to punctuate important moments in poems based on couplets.
  

• It is not as popular as the couplet in English, partly because the repetition of rhyme can saturate the ear of both poet and readers.

• 4-line stanza: Quatrain, Ballad, In Memoriam, Elegiac
  

• Emerges from the combination of couplets, it provides for versatile rhyme schemes that are easily recognizable to the ear: ABAB (heroic or elegiac), ABBA (In Memoriam), ABCB, and so on.
  
• It is the most popular stanza form in English. It is at the heart of the English sonnet, to be discussed by Cristina and Wi Hong.
• The Ballad is one of the oldest forms of the quatrain, to be discussed by Sharon and Janice.
• The heroic or elegiac stanza is associated with noble subjects during the Restoration period, as seen in Dryden's "Annus Mirabilis"

• The In Memoriam stanza (after Tennyson's famous poem) is a quatrain with an ABBA rhyme scheme. It presents a sense of an external couplet gripping an internal one, enclosing an idea, and emphasizing the third line:

• 5-line stanza: Cinquain, "Mad Song," Limerick
• The limerick has an AABBA rhyme scheme and is basically two couplets with final line that is bawdy, surprising, and often humorous in tone, as popularized by Edward Lear:

• 6-line stanza: Sixain, Tail Rhyme, Sestina
• Often composed of two tercets or a quatrain and a couplet.
• Tail rhyme or rime couee, is associated with medieval romances, and is composed of tetrameter lines with an AABCCB rhyme scheme.
• The sestina will be discussed in detail by Sandra and Zaira.

• 7-line stanza: Septain, Rime Royale
• Rime royale is an iambic pentameter stanza with an ABABBCC rhyme scheme, used by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde.

• 8-line stanza: Octave, Ottava Rima
• Ottava rima is has an ABABABCC rhyme scheme and lends itself to narrative punctuated by climax, commentary, or satire, as is the case in Byron's Don Juan:

• 9-line stanza: Spenserian stanza
• The Spenserian stanza consists of 8 iambic pentameter lines with an ABABBCBC rhyme scheme and a final alexandrine (14 syllables) line rhyming C. The irregularity of the final couplet's line lengths breaks the monotony of a form that is too regular in structure. It is the formal engine that propels The Faerie Queene:

• Beyond the 9-line stanza: Sonnets

• While stanza structures with 10 lines and beyond exist and are possible, they are often composed of smaller units, as is the case with the sonnet, to be discussed by Wilmarie and Jennifer.
• Elaborately complex rhyme schemes of large numbers of lines are difficult for the ear to recognize, come across as contrived, and tend to become intellectual exercises used by very few poets and enjoying limited popularity.

• Some critical considerations:
• Whether stanza forms are nonce or fixed, they are important organizing structures for a poem.
• The number of stanzas a poem is written in can be structurally significant and should express something, particularly in short poems.
  
• The white spaces between stanzas mean something, and that something can vary from poem to poem.
• Subverting the spaces between stanzas with enjambment is therefore also meaningful, because they subvert the stanza form.
• Fixed forms have a history and poets who employ fixed form are entering in a conversation with that history, whether they adopt, engage, or subvert the form.