The Stanza by Ernst Haublein - 1978: The Critical Idiom

The stanza has for long been neglected by both prosodists and critical analysts. Prosodists, although providing us with the terminology for a discussion of poetic forms, have tended to isolate those forms from meaning. And structural poetics, while valueable in itself, has been preoccupied with meaning without considering the stanza as an essential aspect of this. Ernst Haublein sets out to bridge this gap by suggesting criteria for relating the stanza to poetic structure. After describing the many foms of stanza used by poets from earliest times to the present day, he goes on to analyse the different strategies by which poets achieve stanzaic units of meaning, to evaluate the logical relationships between stanzas, and finally, to assess their place and function as parts within the poetic whole.