Stanza

The stanza is a group of verse lines united by a common rhythmic, rhyme and intonational-semantic structure that recurs periodically within a work. The stanza is a unit of verse composition higher than the line: it orders the text, creates transitional pauses between semantic parts and forms the overall architectonic pattern. Stanzas are distinguished by the number of lines (distich, tercet, quatrain, quintet, octave) and by the character of rhyming. There are canonical fixed stanzas with an established structure (terza rima, ottava rima, sonnet stanzas) and free authorial stanzas. In Ukrainian poetry stanzaic richness was especially developed by the Neoclassicists, who masterfully mastered the European fixed forms.