adjective. pertaining to Alcaeus, a Greek lyric poet of around 600BC; especially, of a verse meter in a four-line stanza which he supposedly invented

noun. alcaic verses

"Even the four specimens given in the posthumous edition of Clough's poems, two of them elegiac, one alcaic, one in hexameters, though professedly constructed on a quantitative basis, and, in one instance (_Trunks the forest yielded, with gums ambrosial oozing, & c. _) combining legitimate quantity"