Triadic-line poetry or stepped line is a long line which "unfolds into three descending and indented parts".Hirsch. Edward 'A Poet's Glossary', Houghton Mifflin Hsrcourt, Boston, 2014 Created by William Carlos Williams, it was his "solution to the problem of modern verse"Berry Eleanor, 'William Carlos Williams: Triadic-line Verse - An Analysis of its Prosody' Twentieth Century Literature Fall 35.3 1989 and later was also taken up by poets Charles Tomlinson and Thom Gunn.Schmidt, Michael, Lives of the Poets, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1998
Background
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."Interview with Stanley Koehler", Paris Review Vol 6 April 1962 Each of the three staggered lines of the stanza should be thought of as one foot, the whole stanza becoming a trimeter line.Hartman, Charles, Free Verse an essay on Prosody, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1996 Williams' collections Journey to Love (1955) and The Desert Music (1954) Collected Poems ed. Christopher MacGowan, Collected Poems Vol II, Carcanet Press, Manchester, 2000 contained examples of this form. This is an extract from "The Sparrow" by Williams:
Practical to the end, it is the poem of his existence
See also Tristich Trimeter Tercet
References
External links Triadic-Line Poetry-An Analysis of its Prosody-Eleanor Berry Structural Surprise in Triadic-line poetry Interview with W C Williams-Paris Review Vol6