Stanzas

a term that in the 18th and 19th centuries referred to a type of verse used in European poetry, for example, by Byron. The term was applied to a short, primarily meditative lyric consisting of strophes (stanzas) restricted in content and composition. Each stanza contained a complete thought and constituted a syntactic period ending in a full stop; the rhymes were nonrepeating. In Russian poetry, the term referred to a poem written inquatrains, generally of iambic tetrameter, with the rhyme scheme abab; it was most common in the first half of the 19th century. An example is Pushkin’s “Stanzas” (”In hope of glory and the good”). The term went out of use in the second half of the 19th century.