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.

The End Stop

An end stopped line uses punctuation or a natural pause in a sentence to move on to the next line. We see this in Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” very clearly:

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;” (Frost).

The first and fifth lines both end on punctuation that forces us to pause, and the other three lines all end in spots where we would naturally pause when reading. On top of this, there is no additional meaning or tension created in the poem by breaking the lines here. These line breaks help to create rhythm within the poem and help build out Frost’s rhyme scheme—both of which are craft choices in and of themselves. However, I would argue that the creation of rhythm and rhyme can be done without these end stops. Punctuation and pauses that happen within lines (like the comma in Frost’s third line) still create rhythmic patterns in a poem without taking away the power of the line break.

So if end stopped lines aren’t doing anything unique, why do we use them? One example of an effective and unique use of end stopping is in Susannah Nevison’s poem “My Father Dreams of Horses.”

“her limbs—if you carry her
to the river but the river
is made of horses—if you ride
into the forest—if flames—
if your daughter is made” (Nevison, 3).

Only one line is end stopped, and it is for good reason—emphasis. The end stop after “if flames” makes that moment more intense and visceral for the reader. We are literally forced to spend time with the flames instead of being able to move on from them. In this way, the flames become an intentional volta (or turning point) within the poem where we are forced to separate what comes after from what has come before it. This moment only works because Nevison uses end stopped lines sparingly and very intentionally. If every line were end stopped, this moment would lose that additional emphasis and meaning. So, even if we can occasionally use end stops for the development of emphasis and meaning within a poem, we need a strategy for the other lines that aren’t end stops.

Enjambment

At its most basic level, line enjambment is the opposite of an end stop. Enjambment occurs when a poet breaks a line part way through a sentence or phrase, in a place where a person wouldn’t usually pause. This can do two things: (1.) it can create line tension and (2.) it can develop additional meaning. Tension is created when the reader is aware that the line has broken in a place it shouldn’t. This may make the reader feel uneasy because they know that there is information they are not only missing, but that is being intentionally withheld from them, even if it is momentarily. This tension also affects the pace of the line, creating stops in places that add to the sonic interest of the image and poem as a whole. Additional meaning is created when a line can be read differently than the entire phrase or sentence would have been. This also creates tension because it juxtaposes two different meanings within the same image and forces the reader to acknowledge the thematic importance of both, even if the different meanings conflict.

We can see both of these in Chelsea Dingman’s poem “Letter From the Dead to the Living” which opens:

“This morning, riding the train
past my childhood

home, I am traveling the natural
lapsus of disease,

by which I mean desire” (Dingman).

The first line ends on the train and creates tension because we know there must be more information that we haven’t been given. The second and third lines create alternate meanings. In the second line, by ending on “childhood” we first think of the train as metaphorically removing the voice of the poem from their younger life, and in this way, the train becomes a symbolic separation, aging, and loss. But when we get “home” in the third line, we can see the train as being a literal train moving past the voice’s old house. This maintains the symbolic separation between the poetic voice and their childhood but changes the reader’s perspective on the source of this separation. Both of these readings become a part of the poem and enhance our ability for interpretation. We feel an incredible tension here because we are unable to truly resolve both readings and must, instead, inhabit an ambiguous space between both. The third line creates even stronger tension than the first because the “natural” ending leaves us with a statement we cannot make sense of without the fourth line. Finally, the end stop on the fourth line creates an emphasis and transformation that requires us to sit with the sudden appearance of desire at the end of the section.

Operationalizing

This usage of enjambment seems deceptively easy. All we have to do is pay attention to our line breaks and use them more intentionally. Unfortunately, there is a little more to it than that. As poets, we always have to keep in mind how additional meaning changes what a poem does. Sometimes creating an interesting double meaning can do damage in a poem if it makes the aboutness of the poem too difficult for the audience to find. There is also the issue of having multiple options for line breaking. Some phrases will have three or even four good places to break a line, and it is important to spend time with all the options even when one of them seems immediately appealing.

In the end, just practicing with this skill and being conscious of its importance will do great work within your poetry. One activity I use to sharpen my skills is to put one of my poems into an unbroken/paragraph format and read through it. Every time I come across a line that means differently than it does as a whole phrase or statement, I force myself to break it and then try to do the same for the next line. Another good way to practice is to take an older poem by a different poet that is mostly end stopped and reformat it while avoiding endstops. Then you can read through the newly formatted poem, seeing what new work is being done as a result of your breaks. You can even do this with poems like Frost’s that rhyme, you simply make the rhyming internal instead of at the end of lines. Lastly, it is important to remember that writing is a team sport, find other writers who are willing to work with you and try to read through each other's work with a focus on line breaks. Many of my favorite line breaks from my own work have come from the thoughtful comments of my peers. Line breaks can seem unimportant, but sometimes a little extra tension and meaning is the difference between rejection and publication.

Citations

Dingman, Chelsea. “Letter From the Dead to the Living.” The Shore, Issue 19. https://www.theshorepoetry.org/chelsea-dingman-letter-from-the-dead-to-the-living

Frost, Robert. “The Road Not Taken.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken

Nevison, Susannah. “My Father Dreams of Horses [If your daughter is born]” Teratology, Persea Books, 2015.