Answer:
Stanza comes from the Italian, meaning room, or standing or stopping place. In English, in poetry, a stanza is a discrete group of lines, usually four or more (though three lines is a stanza called tercet; two is a couplet), that suggests a unit of some kind. In a poem containing stanzas, the reader passes from room to room, from thought to thought. Formal stanzas often use a particular rhyme scheme (e.g. abab) and/or metrical scheme (iambic pentameter, alexandrine, etc.)
However, the question “How many stanzas are in a poem” is meaningless until we talk about a particular poetic form, or a particular poem. A poem may contain no stanzas at all, or thousands.
