🎭 Culture Sep 8, 2026 · Sandra Beasley

A Life in Stanzas

The American Scholar
American Scholar magazine
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Stanza is the Italian word for a room in a house or building. This fact held little weight for me when I first learned it at 18 years old, slogging my way through an entry-level Italian class that met at nine a.m. every weekday at the University of Virginia.
The word acquired gravity only in the poetry workshops I took in later semesters. Stanzas, I was taught, were a principal organizing measure of poems. If I thought of a poem as a house, each stanza became a room; a poem’s formal thresholds,

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