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 these caesurae. However, at no point did the newer line "replace" the older; rather, they were used concurrently, often in the same poem. This loosening process eventually led to "vers libéré" and finally to "vers libre". In English verse, "alexandrine" is typically used to mean "iambic hexameter": Whereas the French alexandrine is syllabic, the English is accentual-syllabic; and the central caesura (a defining feature of the French) is not always rigidly preserved in English. Though English alexandrines have occasionally provided the sole metrical line for a poem, for example in lyric poems by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and Sir