Sapphic stanzas
I’ve written several poems in an English approximation to Sapphic stanzas. I think the most successful so far is an ecological poem published in Acumen. You can read it by clicking here https://acumen-poetry.co.uk/edmund-prestwich/
For those who don’t know what the Sapphic stanza is, it’s a form strongly associated with and perhaps invented by the Archaic Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos. Greek poets composed in long and short syllables. English poets writing Sapphics almost invariably replace these longs and shorts with stressed and unstressed syllables. The Sapphic stanza then consists of four lines, three of eleven syllables and one of five. … Continue Reading