Triadic-line poetry or stepped line is a long line which "unfolds into three descending and indented parts".[1] Created by William Carlos Williams, it was his "solution to the problem of modern verse"[2] and later was also taken up by poets Charles Tomlinson and Thom Gunn.[3]
Williams referred to the prosody of triadic-line poetry as a "variable foot", a metrical device to resolve the conflict between form and freedom in verse.[4] Each of the three staggered lines of the stanza should be thought of as one foot, the whole stanza becoming a trimeter line.[5] Williams' collections Journey to Love (1955) and The Desert Music (1954) [6] contained examples of this form. This is an extract from "The Sparrow" by Williams:
Practical to the end,
 | This poetry-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
