Triadic-line poetry or stepped line is a long line which "unfolds into three descending and indented parts".
[1] Created by William Carlos Williams, it was his "solution to the problem of modern verse"[2] and later was also taken up by poets Charles Tomlinson and Thom Gunn.
[3] 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.
[5] Williams' collections Journey to Love (1955) and The Desert Music (1954) [6] contained examples of this form.
This is an extract from "The Sparrow" by Williams: Practical to the end, This poetry-related article is a stub.