In poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a "verse" (distinct from the refrain, or "chorus").
A stanza consists of a grouping of two or more lines, set off by a space, that usually has a set pattern of meter and rhyme.The stanza in poetry is analogous with the paragraph that is seen in prose, related thoughts are grouped into units.
In traditional English-language poems, stanzas can be identified and grouped together because they share a rhyme scheme or a fixed number of lines (as in distich/couplet, tercet, quatrain, cinquain/quintain, sestet). In much modern poetry, stanzas may be arbitrarily presented on the printed page because of publishing conventions that employ such features as white space or punctuation.
Read more about Stanza: Stanza Names, Examples
Other articles related to "stanza, stanzas":
... The Burns stanza is a verse form named after the Scottish poet Robert Burns who used it in some fifty poems ... It is also sometimes known as the Scottish stanza or six-line stave ... The first notable poem written in this stanza was the "Lament for Habbie Simpson or, the Life and Death of the Piper of Kilbarchan" by Robert Sempill the younger ...
... for church hymns, such as the first three stanzas (of nine) from a poem by Isaac Watts (from 1719) cited immediately below (in this case, each stanza is to be sung to the same hymn tune, composed earlier by William ... as whole units in themselves, can be broken into stanzas with the same rhyme scheme followed by a final couplet, as in the example of Sonnet 116 Let me not to the marriage of true minds ... Which alters when it alteration finds,