stanza
/ˈstanzə
/noun
1A group of lines forming the basic recurring metrical unit in a poem; a verse.First, with respect to prosody, he believes that the syllable count of poetic lines, strophes, stanzas, and poems was essential to the writing of biblical poetry....
- Free verse is positioned alongside tightly organized stanzas; individual poems range in length from 4 to 204 lines.
- Armed with those data, Jouet composed poems about each of them in a similar poetic form: three stanzas of six verses each.
1.1A group of four lines in some Greek and Latin metres.It is written in stanzas of four octosyllabic lines rhyming a b b a, and is divided into 132 sections of varying length....
- I thought it was curious, then, when I saw the phrase in Sappho, in the first stanza of the poem To Atthis.
Derivatives
stanzaed
- There are prose poems in this work but it is the traditional stanzaed work that gives this volume its form.
- In the opera stanzaed popular songs bring out its thematic and ideological content.
- Sadly he has not completely escaped the variably narrow and slightly thicker, paragraphically stanzaed one-to-two pager.
stanzaic
- The play is written in verse which varies between alternately rhyming quatrains and stanzaic form, the effect being lyric rather than dramatic.
- I suggest therefore that the stanzaic form of ‘Ode’ is reminiscent of Spender's practice in Poems.
- However, sequences in his last three books juxtapose different strophic and stanzaic patterns, prose and verse, relatively coherent narrative elements, dream elements, and fragments of meditation.
Origin
Late 16th century: from Italian, literally 'standing place', also 'stanza'.