Alexandrine
The line's name derives from its use in the Medieval French Roman d'Alexandre of 1170, although it had already been used several decades earlier in Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne.
Where the alexandrine has been adopted, it has frequently served as the heroic verse form of that language or culture, English being a notable exception.
Although alexandrines occurred in French verse as early as the 12th century,[4] they were slightly looser rhythmically, and vied with the décasyllabe and octosyllabe for cultural prominence and use in various genres.
During the Middle Ages they typically occurred with heptameters (seven-beat lines), both exhibiting metrical looseness.
In his Essay on Criticism, Alexander Pope denounced (and parodied) the excessive and unskillful use of this practice: Then at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.
[21] Its structure is:[22] It was used beginning about 1200 for mester de clerecía (clerical verse), typically occurring in the cuaderna vía, a stanza of four alejandrinos all with a single end-rhyme.
[23] Juan Ruiz's Book of Good Love is one of the best-known examples of cuaderna vía, though other verse forms also appear in the work.
[26] Similarly, in early 17th-century Germany, Georg Rudolf Weckherlin advocated for an alexandrine with free rhythms, reflecting French practice; whereas Martin Opitz advocated for a strict accentual-syllabic iambic alexandrine in imitation of contemporary Dutch practice — and German poets followed Opitz.
[26] The alexandrine (strictly iambic with a consistent medial caesura) became the dominant long line of the German baroque.
Moreover, it equally encourages the very different rhythms of iambic hexameter and dactylic tetrameter to emerge by preserving the constants of both measures: Hungarian metrical verse may be written either syllabically (the older and more traditional style, known as "national") or quantitatively.
