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)
French alexandrine de Baïf (lyric), and Pierre de Ronsard. Later, Pierre Corneille introduced its use in comedy. It was metrically stricter, allowing no epic caesura: Typically, each hemistich also holds one secondary accent which may occur on any of the first five syllables, most frequently on the third; this frequently balanced four-part structure resulted in one of several monikers for the line: ' (in contradistinction to the ' or " described below). Often called the "classical alexandrine", ', or ', it became the dominant long line of French verse up to the end of the 19th century, and was "elevated to the