First published in 1978, this work bridges the gap between the study of poetic form, which tends to isolate form from meaning and structural poetics, which tends to focus on meaning without considering the stanza's impact. Beginning with an examination of the various definitions of the stanza, the book goes on to describe the many forms of the stanza and the different strategies by which poets achieve stanzaic units of meaning. It then evaluates the logical relationships between stanzas, and, finally, assesses their place and function as parts within the poetic whole.
This work will be of interest to those studying poetry and literature.
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The poetry of a people does not begin with the line but with the stanza, not with metre but with music.
(Wilhelm Meyer, Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur mittellateinischen Rhythmik, Berlin, 1905, I, p. 51, my translation)
A group of lines of verse (usually not less than four), arranged according to a definite scheme which regulates the number of lines, the metre, and (in rhymed poetry) the sequence of rhymes; normally forming a division of a song or poem consisting of a series of such groups constructed according to the same scheme. Also, any of the particular types of structure according to which stanzas are framed.
(Oxford English Dictionary, def. 1)
This definition seems to cover the main familiar traits of the stanza. Since it could be applied to forms of all periods, it provides an abstract ahistoric formula. If we compare the stanzaic technique of various poets, we realize that stanzas can be employed in many ways. Such differences reflect different concepts of poetic form. In examining what poets and critics from the sixteenth century onwards have said about the stanza, we shall discover stanzaic aspects typical of certain periods and shifting attitudes towards formal features of poetry. Such a survey has never been undertaken before. It may contribute to our understanding of poetry, because it implies a brief history of poetic form.
Poets and early critics
One of the most famous statements on the stanza occurs in George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589), which summarizes prosodical and poetic issues of Elizabethan poetry.
Staffe in our vulgare Poesie I know not why it should be so called, vnlesse it be for that we vnderstand it for a bearer or supporter of a song or ballad, not vnlike the old weake bodie that is stayed vp by his staffe, and were not otherwise able to walke or to stand vpright. The Italian called it Stanza, as if we should say a resting place: and if we consider well the forme of this Poetical staffe, we shall finde it to be a certaine number of verses allowed to go altogether and ioyne without any intermission, and doe or should finish vp all the sentences of the same with a full period, vnlesse it be in some special cases, & there to stay till another staffe follow of like sort: and the shortest staffe conteineth not vnder foure verses, nor the longest aboue ten; if it passe that number it is rather a whole ditty then properly a staffe.
(G. G. Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, II, p. 68)
Puttenham alludes to both the vernacular and the foreign traditions of stanzaic composition. He also distinguishes stanzaic poems by line length and equates syntactic and stanzaic unity. This tenet, which represents one of the main principles of Elizabethan verse, appears in a rather amusing form in George Gascoigne’s Certayne Notes of Instruction (1575):
In all these sortes of verses … auoyde prolixitie and tediousnesse, and euer, as neare as you can, do finish the sentence and meaning at the end of euery staffe where you wright staues, … for I see many writers which draw their sentences in length, and make an ende at latter Lammas: for, commonly, before they end, the Reader hath forgotten where he begon.
(ibid. I, p. 56)
This demand for syntactic unity so typical of a prescriptive attitude pervades criticism and prosody until very recent times (Stewart, Kaluza).
Stanzas were not always highly favoured in the Renaissance. Poets adhering to principles of classical prosody like Campion tend to condemn the use of rhyme; others, like Daniel (1603), defend it. Most of them are less objective than Sir Philip Sidney, who, in his Defence of Poesie (1593), weighs the advantages of both modern accentual rhyming and quantitative rhymeless poetry. Although Ben Jonson wrote beautiful stanzas himself, he joined the battle. He composed a magnificently self-defeating, tongue-in-cheek invective entitled ‘A Fit of Rhyme against Rhyme’, complaining about the demise of perfect versing after ‘the rack of finest wits’ (rhyme) had been introduced. In his Conversations with Drummond of Hawthorndon (1618–19) he confesses that
he had written a discourse of Poesie both against Campion & Daniel especially this last, wher he proves couplets to be the bravest sort of Verses, especially when they are broken, like Hexameters and that crosse Rimes and Stanzaes (becaus the purpose would lead him beyond 8 lines to conclude) were all forced.
(Ben Jonson, Works, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, I, p. 132)
Whereas Puttenham had explained the Italian derivation of stanza, others refer to the Greek etymology of strophe:
Ein Satz oder Gesetze /
ist ein gewisses theil eines Liedes/welches theil aus einer gewissen anzahl Verse/ die nachdem ihm der Tichter vorgenommen hat / in richtiger Länge/Art vnd Reimung zusammengesetzt sind/ bestehet/mit welchem die anderen Satze alle/was Abmessung oder das Metrum anbeLänget/genau übereinstimmen müssen …
Woher bey vns der Satz/(man pfleget ihn bisweilen auch absonderlich einen Vers oder Versickel zu nennen)/seinen Nahmen habe/ist leicht einzusehen/nehmlich/vom setzen/ weil die Verse darinn in gewisser Zahl und Abmessung zusammengesetzt werden. Von den Grichen wird er Strophe, das ist eine Wendung/genennet/weil man nach Endung eines Satzes wieder vmbwendet / vnd nach der ersten Abmessung von newem anfanget.
(Johann Peter Titz, Von der Kunst Hochdeutsche Verse und Lieder zu machen (1642), M. Szyrocki (ed.), Poetik des Barock (Reinbek, 1968), p. 92)
A set
is a certain part of a song that consists of a certain number of lines composed of proper length, kind of line, and rhymes, according to the poet’s plan; with this set all the other sets have to correspond exactly in dimension and metre …
It is easy to see where the German Satz (which, strangely enough, is occasionally called verse or versicle, too) derives its name: in fine, from ‘to set’, because verses of a certain number and proportion are put together in it. It is termed strophe by the Greeks, which means a turn, because after completing one set, one turns around and begins anew, according to the first proportion.
(my translation)
Johann Peter Titz continues the tradition of Opitz. He defines poetry as ‘made to be sung’, a very familiar notion in Elizabethan criticism and poetry. Like August Buchner (1665), Albrecht Christian Rotth (1687) and many others after him, Titz reiterates the demand for syntactic unity in stanzas.
In 1702 Edward Bysshe contends that most stanzas contain lines of different length and alludes to multi-stanzaic poems:
In the Poems compos’d of Stanzas, each Stanza contains a certain number of Verses compos’d for the most part of a different number of Syllables: And a Poem that is in several Stanzas, we generally call an Ode; and that is Lyrick Poetry.
(The Art of English Poetry, p. 25)
The widespread predilection for classical odic forms in Augustan poetry, the impact of Cowley’s experiments in the Pindaric vein and the ensuing vogue of Pindarics are reflected in Bysshe’s reference to odes; they seem to be the epitome of lyric poetry. Bysshe also indicates what should be considered as stanzaic form:
The Stanzas employ’d in our Poetry cannot consist of less than three, and seldom of more than 12 Verses, except in Pindarick Odes.
(ibid. p. 26)
Dr Samuel Johnson’s definition in his Dictionary (1755) was widely accepted and taken over verbatim by other eighteenth-century dictionaries, e.g. Sheridan (1780) and Walker (1791):
[stanza, Ital. stance, Fr.] A number of lines regularly adjusted to each other; so much of a poem as contains every variation of measure or relation of rhyme. Stanza is originally a room of a house, and came to signify a subdivision of a poem; a staff.
The Italian etymology (a room of a house) implies that stanzas are subordinate units within the more comprehensive unity of the whole poem.
Usually, Romantic poets do not refer to stanzas explicitly. However, both Wordsworth and Coleridge allude to them when discussing metre and rhyme in the Lyrical Ballads, which contain a good many poems written in stanzas.
There can be little doubt but that more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose. The metre of the old ballads is very artless; yet they contain many passages which would illustrate this opinion …
Now the music of harmonious metrical language, the sense of difficulty overcome, and the blind association of pleasure which has been previously received from works of rhyme or metre of the same or similar construction, an indistinct perception perpetually renewed of language closely resembling that of real life, and yet, in the circumstance of metre, differing from it so widely – all these imperceptibly make up a complex feeling of delight, which is of the most important use in tempering the painful feeling always found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the deeper passions.
(Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802), D. J. Enright and E. de Chickera (eds), English Critical Essays, pp. 179–80)
For Wordsworth, the main function of metre, rhymes and – by implication – stanzas consists in giving pleasure to the reader and in mitigating the powerful effects of excitement and passion transmitted by poetry. Wordsworth claims that form prevents poetry from overwhelming the reader’s – and the poet’s –emotions. Metrical form is characterized as ‘superadded’.
This superficial, unorganic view, which implies a separation of form and content, is attacked in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1815). Coleridge contends that prose cannot simply be turned into poetry by engrafting metre upon ‘the language of real men’, but that poetic form involves poetic language; hence metre, rhyme and – by implication – stanzas constitute poetry in conjunction with language. Coleridge emphasizes the essential difference between poetry and prose. Like Sidney and many others before him, he stresses the mnemonic function of rhyme and stanzaic composition:
Would the mere superaddition of metre, with or without rhyme, entitle these to the name of poems? The answer is, that nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. If metre be superadded, all other parts must be made consonant with it …
… metre, especially alliterative verse (whether alliterative at the beginning of the words, as in ‘Piers Plowman’, or at the end as in rhymes) possessed an independent value as assisting the recollection, and consequently the preservation, of any series of truths or incidents.
(Enright and Chickera (eds), op. cit. pp. 194, 218)
Since stanzas, like other metrical phenomena, are elements of recurrence, Shelley may refer to them in the following passage from A Defence of Poetry (1821):
Hence the language of poets has ever affected a sort of uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the words themselves …
An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony in the language of poetical minds, together with its relation to music, produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of harmony and language.
(Enright and Chickera (eds), op. cit. p. 230)
Although their use is not mandatory, metric features contribute decisively to the musical effects of poetry. Thus, they enable the poet to sing his message of beauty and moral improvement, and to fulfil his function of prophet and legislator more effectively.
In his Ästhetik (1835) G. W. F. Hegel claims that stanzas are necessary structural markers, through which monotony can be avoided and distinct and variegated forms can be achieved. More important, he links stanzaic composition explicitly with the tone of lyric poetry:
Unter den besonderen Arten der Dichtkunst ist es vornehmlich die lyrische Poesie, welche ihrer Innerlichkeit und subjektiven Ausdrucksweise wegen sich am liebsten des Reimes bedient und dadurch das Sprechen selbst schon zu einer Musik der Empfindung und melodischen Symmetrie, nicht des Zeitmasses und der rhythmischen Bewegung, sondern des Klanges macht, aus welchem das Innere sich selber vernehmlich entgegentönt. Deshalb bildet sich auch diese Art, den Reim zu gebrauchen, zu einer einfacheren oder mannigfaltigen Gliederung von Strophen aus, die sich jede fur sich zu einem geschlossenen Ganzen abrunden.
(Ästhetik, ed. F. Bassenge, II, p. 394)
Among the specific kinds of poetry it is lyric poetry in particular which – because of its inwardness and subjective way of expression – favours the use of rhyme most strongly; consequently, it transforms the very act of speaking as such into a music of feeling and a melodious symmetry, not so much of measured time and rhythmical movement but of sound, out of which the inward soul resounds towards itself audibly. Therefore, this kind of rhyme use leads to more or less sophisticated structures of stanzas,...
