The Importance of Line Breaks: Enjambment as Creating Tension and Additional Meaning in Poetry

One of the many craft tools that I often find to be under utilized by poets is the line break. Some traditional poetic forms, such as the Haiku or Shakespearean Sonnet, break their lines as a result of syllable count or meter. Some poets use punctuation to determine line breaks, and some poetic forms, like the prose poem, abandon the line break outright, making their breaks as a result of word count. These craft choices ignore the line break’s power to create tension—a power these poems might not otherwise have. When you refuse to break your lines purposefully and effectively, you could easily damage the potential of your whole poem.