French alexandrine can be dated exactly: 1886; in this year, editor Gustave Kahn published several seminal ' poems in his review ', including poems by Arthur Rimbaud (written over a decade previously) and Jules Laforgue, with more following in the next years. ' shed all metrical and prosodic constraints, such as verse length, rhyme, and caesura; Laforgue said, "I forget to rhyme, I forget about the number of syllables, I forget about stanzaic structure." French alexandrine The French alexandrine () is a syllabic poetic meter of (nominally and typically) 12 syllables with a medial caesura dividing the line into two hemistichs (half-lines)
Alexandrine as the second (rarely the first) line of heroic couplets, or even more distinctively as the third line of a triplet. In his "Essay on Criticism", Alexander Pope denounced (and parodied) the excessive and unskillful use of this practice: <poem style="margin-left:2em"> Then at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. (lines 354-357) </poem> The Spanish "alejandrino" is a line of 7+7 syllables, probably developed in imitation of the French alexandrine. It was used beginning about 1200 for