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)
Donald Davie's Some Notes on Rhythm in Verse Donald Davie's Some Notes on Rhythm in Verse Some Notes on Rhythm in Verse by Donald Davie first appeared in the "Agenda" poetry journal, in the Autumn / Winter issue 1972–73, and was later collected in his book of essays and interviews, "Trying To Explain." It is a short piece comprising seven numbered paragraphs. He makes a case for scansion being 'a sort of crutch or scaffolding in the act of composition'. The first paragraph states that the boundary between free verse and metred verse is 'smudged'. He writes: "If you shorten an iambic measure to the trimeter, and then