Where did the contemporary 3 line stanza form of poetry originate?

June 17, 2007 9:24 PM

Where did the contemporary 3 line stanza form of poetry originate? [example]

Besides the 3 line stanzas, the other major characteristic is that sentences do not hew to line or stanza breaks. Here's another example where the lines are more irregular. I'm curious to know how far back the form goes, and if there was an originator for it. Heck, it may have a name for all I know (other than tercet or triplet, that is).

posted by Kattullus to writing & language (10 comments total)

this might be of interest
posted by muteh at 11:15 PM on June 17, 2007

There's a couple of different things you're asking about. The issue of stanzaic form is one thing, while the issue of enjambment (when sentences overlap from one line/stanza to the next) is something slightly different.

Paul Fussell's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form does not give an originator for the 3 line stanza or state how far back it goes. I would assume that it goes back as far as people have been writing poetry in English, but it is almost definitely an imported form from the continent. The Anglo-Saxon poets, to my knowledge, would never have written in anything but 2- or 4- line forms. I would imagine that poets started writing in 3-line forms somewhere from 1100-1400. They were certainly doing it in the Renaissance, although couplets and quatrains were more prevalent.

Fussell distinguishes between two main 3 line forms: the tercet is a 3-line form that does NOT contain the same end rhyme in every line (so it could be aab, abb, aba, or unrhymed), vs. a triplet, which will have a thrice-repeated rhyme. From Fussell: "The triplet is not nearly so popular among English poets as the [rhymed] couplet .... [because] The same rhyme sound repeated in sequence without relief tends to produce fatiguing and sometimes comic or bizarre effects".

The main usage for triplets, he says, is as an extension of the heroic couplet. If we have a poem with a series of couplets, a triplet, with its extra emphasis on that last rhyme will "mark moments of climax or special pressure". This sense of climax is sometime increased by adding an extra foot to the meter of that 3rd line.

He also talks about Dante's form (first used in the Commedia; first used in English by Chaucer) the terza rima, which is not, to my knowledge, super popular in English. It is an interlocking rhyme form: aba bcb, cdc, etc. Such complex rhyme schemes tend be a little tricky to pull of in English, often sounding too precious or sing-songy.

According to Fussell (and this book was written in 1953, I think), the 3-line stanza is uncommon in English verse. Obviously, this is not true now, and may not have been entirely true then (Fussell may have been ignoring much modern verse that he personally found unpalatable; he was a bit of a traditionalist). My general feeling is that the 3-line stanza has become more common in the 20th century as a reaction against the previous tendency in English verse for 2 or 4 line forms. Forms of an even number tend to suggest regularity and evenness; they provide a framework that suggests easy comparison or contrast. With the fracturing of poetic sensibilities in response to the fracturing of old systems (of morality, of government, etc.) the 3-line stanza seems a little bit more uneven. The almost waltzing rhythm keeps things always suspended; there isn't the easy closure that comes with a 2-line or 4-line form. There's always something that can't quite be fit into those nice even patterns the Anglo-Saxons loved so much.

In his recent book Blank Verse Robert Shaw talks about how a lot of modern poets have used the 3-line form to allow them to experiment with meter more. In a 2-line form, you can't really contrast an off-meter line with a regular metered line; however, in a 3-line stanza, you can have, say, 2 lines of iambic pentameter (the standard meter for most English verse) and then have a strong contrast with one of the lines being in a different meter (or vice versa).

I haven't touched on the issue of enjambment at all, but again, that is a poetic technique that goes back forever and has generally gotten more popular over time, especially in modern verse where the goal of many poets is to try to capture the rhythms of normal speech.
posted by papakwanz at 11:19 PM on June 17, 2007

Slight correction to what I said earlier... From my post: "The Anglo-Saxon poets, to my knowledge, would never have written in anything but 2- or 4- line forms."

I actually don't know that the Anglo-Saxons (the early Germanic conquerors of England, best known for Beowulf) would have used any stanzaic forms. Beowulf is stichic, that is, it is line after line w/o mathematical groupings. I'd have to go searching for my book on Anglo-Saxon literature to find out if there were other poems of the period that have survived that are organized by stanza. There most definitely were ballads and such that were organized into repetitive stanzas, but I don't know if any survived.
posted by papakwanz at 11:37 PM on June 17, 2007

It's compact, but it's not songlike. English has a fine tradition of poetry in song meters, but it's also got a lot of terrible, artless, cutesy crud in the same. So modern English-language poets have reacted by discarding or even contradicting one or another of the traditions, including rhyme, meter, and stanzaic structure.

And then, of course, there's an 'on the other hand', namely three-line songs such as the blues.

And I do like a good enjambment, but not because of natural speech rhythms as papakwanz suggests. Precisely the opposite: A line break can throw weight onto a word where it would not naturally rest, forcing a little pause and pressing out its connotations.
posted by eritain at 5:05 AM on June 18, 2007

While there's not a formal name for three-line free-verse stanzas -- that would be a kind of contradiction in terms if you think about it -- it's a fairly common practice in modern and contemporary poetry. (The formal roots of three-line stanzas probably include the terza rima, which is what Dante's Divine Comedy is written in and therefore likely familiar to serious students of literature, and the villainelle, common in medieval French poetry. Those formal schemes obviously include rhyme as well, but many free-verse poets adopt the visual structures of formal poetry (unrhymed sonnets, for another example) for their own uses without using the rhyme schemes.)

For free verse, think of the visual structures of the poem as another organizing method, above and beyond, or in parallel to, the grammar and internal rhyme scheme(s) of the sentence-level language -- a verse "paragraph."

The way the ends of lines break the sentence into chunks is called "enjambment" and is an important rhetorical device for modern and contemporary poets. How you break a line gives particular emphases to end and beginning words, divides the rhythm of each resulting chunk of the broken sentence, and creates a visual pattern for the eye. Done poorly, line breaks can enervate otherwise good language, but done well can obviously enhance the verse; one of the common formalist complaints about contemporary free-verse poetry is that [unrhymed] line breaks are usually done poorly and therefore the poem is little more than plain prose chunked out into arbitrary lengths.

Most well-known modern and contemporary poets have written at least some important work in 3-line stanzas. Three who come immediately to my mind are William Carlos Williams (they formatted it poorly but maybe you'll get the idea anyhow) and A. R. Ammons -- though of course 3-line stanza were only one "form" these free verse poets have used among many. (You can probably flip through any standard poetry anthology, such as the Norton Modern poetry anthology, and see plenty of examples.) Don't forget that the visual look and rhythm of haiku, usually written in English in three lines, influences a lot of contemporary poets, even if they don't adopt the other strictures of the haiku form.
posted by aught at 7:27 AM on June 18, 2007

I strongly suspect WCW is responsible for this, though he would be appalled by the sloppy crap that gets printed because people can't tell the difference between his carefully crafted lines and any random junk. From here:

He summarizes the generative question of his poetics in Paterson, Book Three: “What language could allay our thirsts, / what winds lift us, what floods bear us / past defeats / but song but deathless song?” His answer was a life-long search for a new measure – a new line and new music – to convey the wildness and beauty of America, its people, and their speech. Occasionally in Paterson and often in later poems this measure becomes a triadic stair-stepped line, a long line broken into three parts, perhaps derived from the poet’s breathing or the movement of his feet across his chosen landscape.

posted by languagehat at 11:27 AM on June 18, 2007

I just came from the library where I read the article muteh linked to, "Stanzas and Anti-Stanzas" (1978) by Philip K. Jason. It answered both my questions, placing the origin of the form with James Tate in his first book, The Lost Pilot (title poem), published in 1967. He even gives the form a name, sight-stanzas. The word hasn't caught on, though I think I'll start using it now. Eleanor Berry, in her essay "Williams' Development Of A New Prosodic Form—Not The 'Variable Foot,' But The Sight-Stanza," (1981) uses the same word to refer to the prosody of William Carlos Williams. From what little I've been able to find online whether she uses the term to describe Williams' poetry or the poetry Williams was reacting against (though from the title I'd say it's the former).

Furthermore, it clarified something that I hadn't realized. The two examples I gave above are actually quite different forms. The first is the more regular-looking Tate sight-stanza, while the other example is descended from Sylvia Plath. Jason talks about Ariel, though he's much kinder to it than the Tate poem he takes as an example. The first, Tateish* stanza, gives the appearance of carefulness and order to a poem, while the second, Plathish stanza, suggests barely contained chaos and confusion. The former looks classical, the latter spontaneous.

Unless someone can find a poem that looks like The Lost Pilot or Liverpool Disappears for a Billionth of a Second that is from before 1967 and not by James Tate I think I can safely say that the common contemporary 3 line sight-stanza form originates with James Tate, in his book The Lost Pilot. I could spout off some theories as to why this form came into being and caught the eyes of succeeding poets (e.g. as a reaction against the perceived "wildness" of Ginsberg, the Beats and hippies or possibly language poetry) that is beyond the scope of my present ambition. I'm just exceedingly glad that ask.me, through Philip K. Jason, managed to track down a plausible point of origin for the form.

Thanks everyone, and especially muteh.


*I feel the need to mention that James Tate has stopped using that form completely, as far as I can tell.
posted by Kattullus at 12:23 PM on June 18, 2007

Should have been: From what little I've been able to find online it's unclear whether she uses the term to describe Williams' poetry or the poetry Williams was reacting against (though from the title I'd say it's the former).

Oh, and the "it" in the first sentence of the second paragraph refers to "Stanzas and Anti-Stanzas," not Eleanor Berry's essay.
posted by Kattullus at 12:50 PM on June 18, 2007

Late to the party, but maybe you're still interested, Katullus. Pinning the origin of this "anti-form" (really more a particular usage of stanza) to Tate is hasty and arbitrary. Jason cites him as an example of a much larger trend; it's a leap to consider him the origin. Creeley's Collected 1945-75 has some good earlier instances. "I Know a Man" would probably make Jason's head explode. I'm looking also at "Hello" and "Quick-Step" (link goes to poem text and possibly relevant, though dismissive and boneheaded, discussion). Frank O'Hara has poems which use the stanza in this way, and they also predate The Lost Pilot (O'Hara died in 1966). Examples: "Poem in January," "In Hospital," "A Chinese Legend," etc. There are plenty of much earlier instances in WCW, as others have suggested, and Wallace Stevens, if what you're looking for is stanzas/lines that don't match their sentences.

There are bigger problems with the Jason essay, though. He repeatedly attacks Plath, Tate, and unnamed others on essentially moral grounds, ie, that they're being dishonest, concealing the truth about their own poems. This is weird, and telling. Also, he is blind to organizing principles that fall outside of unity and comprehensibility, which must have seemed a little silly even in 1978, never mind today. Regarding Plath's poem: "The typographical suggestion of unit equivalency creates a puzzle that cannot really be overcome and thus enjoyed." Your own reading of her stanza (barely contained chaos) hits much closer to the mark -- how could one expect to overcome or enjoy that? No wonder he's baffled by the nervous looseness of the Tate poem.

Good question! Interesting stuff to think about.
posted by sleevener at 6:51 PM on June 30, 2007

Damn... I even have the Collected Works of Frank O'Hara resting snugly on my shelf. Why I didn't think of him immediately astounds me. Thanks sleevener! I don't know Creeley well, but I'll take your word for it that he was writing in this form before Tate. One of these days I'm going to sit down in a library with a stack of Creeley books and try and figure out who came up with it first, O'Hara or Creeley.
posted by Kattullus at 5:37 PM on September 15, 2007