( versi sciolti da rima , “verse freed from rhyme”). In It. prosody, verses (generally hendecasyllables [q. v.], i. e. endecasillabi sciolti )not bound together by rhyme or grouped in regular strophes. V. s. appear late in the 13th c. in the anonymous satire the Mare amoroso but were first cultivated during the Ren. as the It. equivalent of the Cl. epic meter the hexameter (q. v.). Trissino used them in his tragedy Sofonisba (1515; cf. his treatise La poetica , 1529) and in his epic L’Italia liberata dai Goti (begun 1528; pub. 1547), as did Tasso in his Le sette giornate del mondo creato . They quickly became the preferred meter for It. trs. of Cl. epics (e. g. A. Caro’s Eneide , 1581). Despite Trissino’s lack of success, however, a controversy arose between the advocates of cl. austerity and the advocates of rhyme (q. v.). In the 16th c., rhyme won the day, but in the 18th c. and thereafter, v. s. were used with great success, particularly by Parini ( Ilgiorno ), Foscolo ( I sepolcri ), Leopardi (some of I canti ), and Manzoni ( Urania ). Alfieri almost singlehanded made them the standard meter for tragedy. In more recent times, the dramatist Sem Benelli used them for several dramas, and Pascoli adopted them for all but the last of his Poemi Conviviali. Endecasillabi sciolti are equivalent to blank verse (q. v.) and were an important influence on the devel. of that form in Eng. —J. M. Steadman, “Verse Without Rime: 16th-C. Defenses of V. S.,” Italica 41 (1964); Wimsatt; F. Caliri, Tecnica e poesia (1974); L. Castelnuovo, La metrica italiana (1979); Elwert, Italienische , sect. 72, 57, 119; O. B. Hardison, Jr., Prosody and Purpose in the Eng. Ren . (1989).
User Comments Add a comment…