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
Metre (poetry) Catullus 51 (itself an homage to Sappho 31): The Sapphic stanza was imitated in English by Algernon Charles Swinburne in a poem he simply called "Sapphics": The metrical system of Classical Arabic poetry, like those of classical Greek and Latin, is based on the weight of syllables classified as either "long" or "short". The basic principles of Arabic poetic metre "Arūḍ" or Arud ( ') Science of Poetry ( '), were put forward by Al-Farahidi (786 - 718 CE) who did so after noticing that poems consisted of repeated syllables in each verse. In his first book, "Al-Ard" ( ""),