The iambic line, with its characteristic forward movement from short to long, or light to heavy, or unstressed to stressed, is the quintessential measure of English verse.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose.
The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.
At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse.
I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.
At somewhere around 10 syllables, the English poetic line is at its most relaxed and manageable.
The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.
Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.
There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.
The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.