French alexandrine 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) of six syllables each. It was the dominant long line of French poetry from the 17th through the 19th century, and influenced many other European literatures which developed alexandrines of their own. According to verse historian Mikhail Gasparov, the French alexandrine developed from the Ambrosian octosyllable, by gradually losing the final two syllables, then doubling this line in a syllabic context with phrasal stress rather than length as a marker. The earliest
Line break (poetry) Beginning a line with an uppercase letter when the beginning of the line does "not" coincide with the beginning of a new sentence is referred to by some as "majusculation". (this is an invented term derived from majuscule). The correct term is a coroneted verse. In T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, where ambiguity abounds, a line break in the opening ("ll". 5–7) starts things off. Because the lines start with capitalized letters, Eliot could be saying "Earth" as the planet or "earth" as the soil. Line break (poetry) A line break in poetry is the termination of the line of