Introduction

The techniques a poet uses are often different than those used by writers of fiction, drama, and creative nonfiction. The most prominent of these techniques is lineation. Lineation is the process of breaking lines. If the sentence is the primary unit of fiction and dialogue is the primary unit of drama, the line is the primary unit of poetry. Lineation refers to the crafting of a poem’s lines.

How does a poet decide to break lines? What do those choices reveal about the poem, its style and its theme? In this week’s course material, you’ll learn about how line breaks can help a poet present multiple meanings simultaneously by presenting language that can be at once literal and metaphorical.

A poem, though, is usually composed of numerous lines. These lines may be grouped in what are known as stanzas. Stanzas might be the poetic equivalent of paragraphs; they underscore a shift—subtle or not so subtle—in movement, topic, or action. The number of lines in a stanza determines its name. A couplet, for instance, consists of two lines. A tercet has three lines. Quatrains have four lines. As you learn which of these stanzas are associated with which poetic forms, you’ll develop a great sense of how they help a poet achieve a particular meaning.

Poetic Techniques

Free Verse

Free verse refers to poetry that does not follow standard or regularized meter (the organization of stressed and unstressed syllables) or rhyme scheme. As opposed to more traditional poetry, which tends to use recurring line lengths, metrical patterns, and rhyme to unify individual lines of verse and tie them to other lines within the same poem, free verse can, at times, seem to be random, having no pattern or organization at all. Yet in the hands of many poets, free verse enables a different kind of organization, as they balance free verse’s openness, its ability to provide elements of the poem with a different amount of emphasis, with the use of repeated imagery or syntactic patterns (parallel organization of grammatical elements) to maintain coherence and create a sense of connection among lines. Even as it eschews regular meter and rhyme schemes, free verse does, at times, draw on metrical patterns and occasional rhyme to tie lines together. What distinguishes free verse from other traditional forms of verse is that it only uses these elements occasionally—for a few lines here and there in a longer poem—and does not use them to structure the poem as a whole. A poem in free verse, then, does not lack structure—or, in many cases, some instances of metrical organization or rhyme—it simply does not maintain or use a regular pattern of meter or rhyme to structure the poem as a whole. Instead, free verse relies more on thematic, syntactic, or semantic repetition and development to create coherence.

Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is often credited as introducing free verse into English-language poetry. While not quite true (other experiments and uses preceded his), Whitman’s poetry helped to establish free verse’s potential for exploring a broad range of topics and its ability to embrace an extensive number of ways of organizing verse lines. Later-nineteenth-century poets, such as Matthew Arnold in England, further explored the use of free verse, but it was the French symbolists (Jules Laforgue, Gustave Kahn, and Arthur Rimbaud) who practiced what they called vers libre most fully during this period. In the twentieth century, free verse came to dominate much poetic production in English, beginning with the modernists (such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams) who saw the open form as allowing for the more nimble representation of a modern fragmented and accelerated world.

Lines and Line-Breaks

Poets are skilled at noticing things, and one of the things we should learn to notice is how other poets employ the various devices at their disposal. All poems, even those which don’t conform to a pre-existing model or form, use technical elements, even if these may not be immediately apparent. In the next few sections we are going to study, discuss and try out certain technical aspects of poetic writing, starting with lines and line-breaks.

Is something poetry only if it rhymes and has ‘proper’ line-breaks? Is the following a poem?

I go back to May 1937
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head,
I see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it – she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
Sharon Olds

This poem seems to break the rules about the whole purpose of a line-break. Who ever heard of breaking a line after ‘I’ or ‘its’ or ‘the? In a free verse poem like this, the line-breaks vary, and are individual to that poem.

Unorthodox line-breaks may propel the poem forwards, as in the earlier section of the above poem, but other line-breaks might be considered with reference to the ideas. For example, to finish a line with ‘Stop’ has a dramatic impact, made more so when we consider that the narrator is helpless to stop the past, as framed by a photograph. The line that finishes with ‘I’ seems appropriate to the poem, when we consider the theme, and the concluding statement of intent that ‘I’ makes, which is about the very poem itself.

On the simplest level, we might place an imaginary frame around the line of a poem, in order to enclose or focus that line’s thought, idea or image. When a line is divided in an unorthodox way, tipping the weight and sense down into the next line, we call this enjambement. Use of this device affects how the reader experiences the line, and where the emphasis is put. John Hollander, in Rhyme’s Reason, explains these effects by example:

A line can be end-stopped, just like this one,
Or it can show enjambement, just like this
One, where the sense straddles two lines: you feel
As if from shore you’d stepped into a boat.
John Hollander

In order to make decisions about line-breaks, you’ll want to assess the direction the poem is taking, and where you want it to go. These may be two different things. Line-breaks can:

• effect a juxtaposition of like or unlike things, within a single line or divided across two lines
• evoke a sensation (freedom, discomfort, excitement, etc.), perhaps by breaking the line in an unnatural place
• impel the narrative drive forward
• create room in which to expand a train of thought or idea
• subvert or challenge existing conventions, if this suits the theme of the poem.

The following poem seems to be about line-breaks, but in fact it is about something else. The reader might deduce from the line-breaks, rather than just from the content, what that ‘something’ is.

The literal and the metaphor
Lover
or not of poetry,
you rehearse an impressive show as a lover
of women,
and you’re a natural with your line
in line-
breaks.
Eva Salzman

Humour might be seen to be masking a more serious message about the nature of relationships. In this way all the technical elements contribute to the message. The poem’s brevity reiterates ideas about the transitory nature of love. It is divided into two sections, the first offering a situation and the second amplifying this situation. Somewhere in between, the penny drops. Remember Frost’s surprises for both reader and writer? This poem, ostensibly about form, discovers and makes connections between seemingly unrelated things.

Such self-reflexive poems, about form itself, clearly illustrate how form and content are integrated. The structure is neither arbitrary nor irrelevant. In a way, the Sharon Olds poem you read, ‘I go back to May 1937’, was also about itself – its own history. Poems about poems generally work better if they are about something other than just themselves – or at least seem to be. Good poems usually work on more than one level: the literal level (ground level) and the deeper level (the basement). Furthermore, these ‘houses’ may have several floors.

Introduction to Literature. Licensed under CC BY SA 4.0 https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-introliterature/chapter/free-verse/
What is Poetry?. Licensed under CC BY SA 4.0 http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/culture/literature-and-creative-writing/literature/what-poetry/content-section-5.1

Summary

Poets use line breaks to evoke emotion, develop a theme, participate in a poetic tradition, follow – or break the rules of – a form. The lengths of lines may very, but no matter how long or short a line is, remember that the line is a poet’s primary unit of meaning. It’s the equivalent of a sentence in a novel.

A group of lines is called a stanza. The word for stanza comes from the Italian word for “room,” and keeping that in mind may prove instructive. Each stanza of a poem contains important components of a poem, just each room of a home contains elements that help a household function. Of course, function is very broad idea. A vase of flowers on the coffee table in the living room might serve the function of bringing natural beauty to one’s living environment. In the same spirit, a phrase or a line in a stanza may function to create a mood or tone.

It is useful to familiarize yourself with the most common poetic stanzas. Couplets, tercets, and quatrains may all work to underscore the theme a poet is exploring. Understanding the implications of each type of stanza is something that you will develop the more you read poetry.