ABSTRACT
One of the most famous statements on the stanza occurs in George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie, which summarizes prosodical and poetic issues of Elizabethan poetry. 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. The Italian etymology implies that stanzas are subordinate units within the more comprehensive unity of the whole poem. The notion that stanzas may be historically ‘dated’ has been repeated by many contemporary poets. Louis Zukofsky, who quotes Ezra Pound’s statement on the musical origin of stanzas almost verbatim, claims that ‘existence does not foster this technique at all times indiscriminately’. Robert Lowell regards the stanza as a whole to be ‘rounded out’ by a climax. They write a very musical, difficult poem with tremendous skill, perhaps there’s never been such skill.
