Triadic-line poetry or stepped line, in effect a long line split into three and indented, was created by William Carlos Williams and taken up later by poets Charles Tomlinson and Thom Gunn,.
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. Each of the three staggered lines of the stanza should be thought of as one foot, the whole stanza becoming a trimeter line. Williams' collections Journey to Love (1955) and The Desert Music (1954) contained examples of this form. This is an extract from "The Sparrow" by Williams
Practical to the end,
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- it is the poem
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- of his existence
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- it is the poem
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References
- ^ Schmidt, Michael, Lives of the Poets, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London 1998 ISBN 978-0753807453
- ^ "Interview with Stanley Koehler", Paris Review Vol 6 April 1962
- ^ Hartman, Charles, Free Verse an essay on Prosody, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1996 ISBN 0-8101-1316-3
- ^ Collected Poems ed. Christopher MacGowan, Collected Poems Vol II, Carcanet Press, Manchester, 2000 ISBN 1-85754-523-0
External links
- Structural Surprise in Triadic-line poetry
- Paris Review Vol6
