#Shakespeare400: Sonnet Total of 616 Stanzas

There are a number of websites dedicated to poetry that explain that the word stanza means “room” in Italian. The etymology of the word stanza comes from  from Vulgar Latin stantia meaning “standing, stopping place.” Other explanations  include- “a station,” or “a stopping place” -where each stanza in a poem is compared to a small dwelling. Sonnet

Shakespeare’s sonnets share a distinctive style. Each sonnet has three rhyming quatrains (abab/cdcd/efef) and a rhyming couplet (gg), a style that has been named Shakespearean. These sonnets differ from the Petrarchan sonnet, named for the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch.

There are 154 sonnets written by Shakespeare, and that is a total of 616 stanzas. If you want to be literal, and think of stanzas as little rooms, you could check what those 616 “stanzas”  might look like in the following:


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