Terza Rima

Literary/ Cultural Context Note

Litencyc Editors (Independent Scholar - Europe)
Download PDF Add to Bookshelf Report an Error

Resources

This verse form was made particularly famous because Dante used it in

The Divine Comedy

. It requires three-line stanzas (tercets) with the rhyme scheme

a b a, b c b, c d c

and so on. It is much more suited to Romance languages than to English, and especially to Italian where the high frequency of vowel sounds at the ends of words makes such a structure feasible and even necessary.

71 words

Citation: Editors, Litencyc. "Terza Rima". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 November 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1095, accessed 19 March 2024.]

1095 Terza Rima 2 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here

Leave Feedback

The Literary Encyclopedia is a living community of scholars. We welcome comments which will help us improve.