Triadic-line poetry
Triadic-line poetry or stepped line is a long line which "unfolds into three descending and indented parts".Hirsch. Edward 'A Poet's Glossary', Houghton Mifflin Hsrcourt, Boston, 2014 {{ISBN|9780151011957}} Created by William Carlos Williams, it was his "solution to the problem of modern verse"Berry Eleanor, 'William Carlos Williams: Triadic-line Verse - An Analysis of its Prosody' Twentieth Century Literature Fall 35.3 1989 and later was also taken up by poets Charles Tomlinson and Thom Gunn.Schmidt, Michael, Lives of the Poets, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1998 {{ISBN|978-0753807453}}
Background
Williams referred to the prosody of triadic-line poetry as a "variable foot", a metrical device to resolve the conflict between form and freedom in verse."Interview with Stanley Koehler", Paris Review Vol 6 April 1962 Each of the three staggered lines of the stanza should be thought of as one foot, the whole stanza becoming a trimeter line.Hartman, Charles, Free Verse an essay on Prosody, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1996 {{ISBN|0-8101-1316-3}} Williams' collections Journey to Love (1955) and The Desert Music (1954) Collected Poems ed. Christopher MacGowan, Collected Poems Vol II, Carcanet Press, Manchester, 2000 {{ISBN|1-85754-523-0}} contained examples of this form. This is an extract from "The Sparrow" by Williams:
Practical to the end,
::::::it is the poem
::::::::::of his existence
See also
References
External links
- [https://www.jstor.org/stable/441729?seq=24#page_scan_tab_contents Triadic-Line Poetry-An Analysis of its Prosody-Eleanor Berry]
- [https://fredonia.academia.edu/NatalieGerber/Papers/1285685/Structural_Surprise_in_the_Triadic-Line_Poems Structural Surprise in Triadic-line poetry]
- [http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4486/the-art-of-poetry-no-6-william-carlos-williams Interview with W C Williams-Paris Review Vol6]
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