Sapphic stanza in Polish poetry for Renaissance poets. Horace's Sapphic stanza comprised three "lesser sapphics" and an "adonic": In Polish there was no quantitative verse, as phonemic quantity itself was extinct. Nor was there accentual-syllabic versification, save some attempts by Jan Kochanowski. But Polish syllabic lines were available. A syllabic hendecasyllable 11(5+6) took the place of the quantitative lesser sapphic; likewise with the adonic. The hendecasyllable (with caesura after the fifth syllable) is very common in Polish poetry, and the pentasyllable is so typical for Polish verse that Karol Wiktor Zawodziński gave it the name of "polonik". Pentasyllables occur in Polish poetry either in a
A Wrong Turning in American Poetry A Wrong Turning in American Poetry 'A Wrong Turning in American Poetry' is an essay by United States poet Robert Bly which was first published in "Choice" magazine in 1963 and collected in "American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity." It has subsequently been anthologized in "Twentieth-Century American Poetics". In the essay, Bly found all Modern and contemporary American verse (up until he was writing his essay in 1963) to be lacking in spirituality and what he termed "inwardness." He also argued that the vast majority of American poets were cut off from the unconscious mind, that their verse was prosaic and