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Stanzas group ideas, indicate tone changes, and create visual interest in poetry. Traditional forms impose verse breaks at predictable points, while open form poets use them for various reasons. Visual poets use stanzas to create visually charged messages and challenge expectations.
Stanzas perform a number of functions in a poem. Some poets use stanzas in poetry to group ideas or images that belong together. Others indicate a change in tone, direction, or idea by creating a new verse. Some poets play with the suggestion of silence that implies a stanza break, and still others use stanzas and the white spaces that divide them to create visual interest.
Many cultures have traditional poetic forms that impose a visual, imaginative or aural “architecture” on a particular type of poem and force verse breaks at predictable points. An example is the sonnet. Petrarchian, or Italian, sonnets are organized in two stanzas for a total of 14 lines; the first stanza consists of eight lines, followed by a six-line stanza. English, or Shakespearean, sonnets are also 14 lines long, but are organized into three quatrains or four-line stanzas, followed by a couplet or two-line stanza.
Other traditional forms such as haiku or villanelle are organized around triplets, or three-line stanzas in poetry. In the case of haiku, originally a Japanese form that has gained a large following among poets writing in English, a single tercet makes up the entire poem. A villanelle, which has roots in the French troubadour tradition, contains several three-line stanzas which alternately repeat a whole line.
Poets who write in open form are not limited as to where to place stanzas in the poem. These poets use verse breaks for a multitude of intellectual, intuitive, or emotional reasons. For some, a verse break gives the reader a chance to pause momentarily and reflect on the group of lines they have just completed. For others, a stanza break suggests surprise and often takes the poem in a completely unexpected direction.
Visual poets, such as ee cummings and later concrete poets, use the appearance of words, letters, numbers and symbols on a page in a visual and linguistically artistic way. For these poets, stanzas in poetry are opportunities to create not only conceptually meaningful, but also visually charged ideas or messages. By creating unexpected patterns on the page, including stanza breaks that might feature much more than two blank lines or stanzas that run horizontally rather than vertically, these poets not only present poems that cross the boundaries of media, but poems that challenge the reader’s anticipation and suggest the function of art is to shatter expectations.
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