Redondilla

History:

The Redondilla is a Spanish, specifically Castillian, stanza form and is the result of the breaking in two at the strophic caesura of the Copla de Arte Menor,  (not to be confused with the Arte Mayor) in the 16th century. (Note: for context, the Copla is another Spanish form, and Arte Menor vs. Arte Mayor refers to whether it has less than or greater than 8 syllables per line, basically. More on that in its own entry.)

Structure:

  • octosyllabic quatrain stanzas rhyming abba and occasionally abab
  • that’s it. Ezra Pound apparently really dug this form.

Sources:

  • https://www.britannica.com/art/redondilla
  • http://www.comedias.org/resources/poetic.html
  • http://hemi.nyu.edu/course-nyu/nation/webchat5/messages/83.html
  • Greene, Roland, and Stephen Cushman. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton University Press, 2012.

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