Where did the contemporary 3 line stanza form of poetry originate?
There’s a couple of different things you’re asking about. The issue of stanzaic form is one thing, while the issue of enjambment (when sentences overlap from one line/stanza to the next) is something slightly different. Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter and Poetic Form does not give an originator for the 3 line stanza or state how far back it goes. I would assume that it goes back as far as people have been writing poetry in English, but it is almost definitely an imported form from the continent. The Anglo-Saxon poets, to my knowledge, would never have written in anything but 2- or 4- line forms. I would imagine that poets started writing in 3-line forms somewhere from 1100-1400. They were certainly doing it in the Renaissance, although couplets and quatrains were more prevalent. Fussell distinguishes between two main 3 line forms: the tercet is a 3-line form that does NOT contain the same end rhyme in every line (so it could be aab, abb, aba, or unrhymed), vs. a triplet, which will have a
It’s compact, but it’s not songlike. English has a fine tradition of poetry in song meters, but it’s also got a lot of terrible, artless, cutesy crud in the same. So modern English-language poets have reacted by discarding or even contradicting one or another of the traditions, including rhyme, meter, and stanzaic structure. And then, of course, there’s an ‘on the other hand’, namely three-line songs such as the blues. And I do like a good enjambment, but not because of natural speech rhythms as papakwanz suggests. Precisely the opposite: A line break can throw weight onto a word where it would not naturally rest, forcing a little pause and pressing out its connotations.
