Alexandrine introduce phrasal accentuation, or rigorously observe the medial caesura, as in French." Common usage within the literatures of European languages is broader still, embracing lines syllabic, accentual-syllabic, and (inevitably) stationed ambivalently between the two; lines of 12, 13, or even 14 syllables; lines with obligatory, predominant, and optional caesurae. Although alexandrines occurred in French verse as early as the 12th century, they were slightly looser rhythmically, and vied with the "décasyllabe" and "octosyllabe" for cultural prominence and use in various genres. "The alexandrine came into its own in the middle of the sixteenth century with the poets of the Pléiade
French alexandrine as an alternative rhythm to the classical alexandrine. His famous self-descriptive line: exemplifies the structure of the ", which preserves the medial caesura with a word break, but de-emphasizes it by surrounding it with two stronger phrase breaks after syllables four and eight: Although generally embraced by the French Romantics and Symbolists, the ' remained a supplemental line, used within a classical alexandrine context and forming no more than one quarter of the alexandrine lines written during this time. Passages of classical alexandrines were still written by these poets, as for example this ' quatrain by Charles Baudelaire: These three