As poets of the past gradually parted ways with fixed meter, they encountered an inevitable question: where does one now end the line—and why? Absent traditional metrical forms, which stipulated the number of feet or syllables a given line could contain, lineation became, more than ever before, a matter of individual artistic discernment.
From the start, this fact has disturbed poets, critics, and readers alike. In 1917, for example, a young T.S. Eliot bemoaned the decline of meter at the hands of so-called vers libre: “If vers libre is a genuine verse-form it will have a positive definition. And I can define it only in negatives: (1) absence of pattern, (2) absence of rhyme, (3) absence of metre.” A century later, one might question Eliot regarding his first two points, but the third largely holds true today: free-verse poets eschews fixed meters, so their lines must end for some other reasons.
That free-verse poets have reasons, at least some of the time, for why they end lines is a premise of this essay. Such reasons may be as varied as the poets themselves, but they nevertheless serve as criteria to which readers may appeal when evaluating a non-metrical poem. Below I investigate several of the most prominent devices free-verse poets have employed when choosing where one line ends and another begins. Because one cannot always interrogate a poet’s intentions, however, we will mostly confine our study to those devices whose effects exercise the greatest power within a poem. Of course, a single poem will often employ multiple line-ending strategies, so we will pay particular attention to the effects of such juxtaposition. Ultimately I hope to show that, while free-verse poetry as such may still defy any substantive “positive definition,” nevertheless the poetic line has good grounds to stand on.
Perhaps the most sensible place to start is with the end-stopped line, which The Poetry Foundation defines as a “line ending at a grammatical boundary or break—such as a dash or closing parenthesis—or with punctuation such as a colon, a semicolon, or a period.” In short, end-stopped lines serve syntax, yielding poems with more natural rhythms and progressions. Take the opening lines of Mary Oliver’s renown poem “Wild Geese”:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Oliver’s frequent use of end stops loosens the tension between line and syntax. However, when she occasionally enjambs her syntax over a line—as in “your body / loves what it loves”—the tension contracts, and readers feel drawn deeper into the work. A poem consisting entirely of end-stopped lines could develop tension and rhythm through diction, syntax, or other means (not unlike a prose poem), but its line endings would shoulder the least possible amount of responsibility for the poem’s final force. Hence, as Oliver demonstrates, the end stop seems to exercise its most dynamic effects when combined with alternative line endings. We will return to this point below.
Next, poets may choose not to conclude every line with hard punctuation but still break syntax in what they deem to be regular places. This James Longenbach calls “parsing” a poem: “[W]hile the lines are not end-stopped, they generally follow the normative turns of the syntax, breaking it at predictable points rather than cutting against it” (Longenbach 55). Like the end-stop, parsing respects the basic contours of sentences, rendering lines that read similar to prose, visually and sonically. Each line will tend to present, if not a complete thought, at least an image or idea which purports to a degree of independence from its surroundings. Ted Kooser seems to favor a parsing approach when breaking lines. His poem “Choosing a Reader” skillfully employs end stops and parsing. Here’s how it begins:
First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She would be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
Few of these endings tug against the “normative turns of the syntax.” They feel natural, offering rests where readers might already be considering pausing for breath. Often this means ending a line before a prepositional phrase: e.g., “poetry / at the loneliness moment…” Or “neck / from washing it.” These gentle breaks (if “breaks” is not too harsh a word) afford readers an easier time following syntax while generating just enough energy to keep the poem moving. When Kooser ends line 6 with a provocative word like “dirty,” however, he deviates from the pattern and calls readers to full attention. “The drama of lineation,” Longenbach rightly suggests, “lies in the simultaneous making and breaking of our expectation for pattern” (70).
Parsing almost inevitably yields lines of similar length, resulting in poems whose final shapes are more rectangular than triangular or serrated. For Kooser, this is deliberate; line breaks should guide readers deeper into the words and images of the poem, in his view, not present syntactical tripping hazards. He elaborates in The Poetry Home Repair Manual: “My point is that if while being absorbed by the poem, the reader has to stop and think, ‘Why did the poet make that one line so short, Why’s that line indented when none of the others are?” that reader has been drawn back to the surface of the page” (Kooser 67).
On the other hand, Longenbach notes that a poem “dominated by the parsing line” so places line in service of syntax as to render its lineation somewhat redundant (Longenbach 56). For many poets—Kooser likely among them—this is hardly problematic. Poems are poems by many means. For others, the answer will be to adopt a more radical strategy to ending lines.
Specifically, some poets deliberately end lines in ways that cut against the normative turns of their syntax, an approach Longenbach calls “annotating,” referring to how such lines work to accentuate words or ideas that the syntax alone does not (53). Relying heavily on enjambment, annotated line endings generate more tension down a poem as they augment, trouble, or even appear to contradict individual grammatical units. Longebach seems especially to favor annotated lines for how they facilitate a “drama of discovery” (53). By ending lines in less predictable places, the poet impels readers forward to achieve a sense of syntactical equilibrium. Intended or not, the process may seem vertiginous, as standalone lines will not always render complete thoughts, giving way to incoherence or suggesting multiple interpretations.
In her essay “On the Function of the Line,” Denise Levertov similarly speaks of the line-break as a form of “punctuation” additional to that of syntax. Line-breaks thus uniquely allow poetry to “present the dynamics of perception along with its arrival at full expression” (Levertov 31). To contort an idea from Kierkegaard, we might then understand line-breaks as establishing a teleological suspension of the syntactical that invites readers to “share more intimately in the experience that is being articulated” (Levertov). Indeed, for Levertov, this ability to incorporate and disclose the poet’s process of “thinking/feeling, feeling/thinking” is one of the hallmarks of contemporary, non-metrical poetry—an ability largely made possible by the line-break.
The first two lines of Adam Zagajewski’s poem “Transformation” illustrate how the annotative approach plays with semantics in addition to syntax:
I haven’t written a single poem
in months.
For a brief moment, before reaching the second line, we wonder whether the speaker has ever written a single poem, which is a striking way to start a poem! Of course, “for months” qualifies the thought, but the remaining lines bear out the speaker’s hyperbolic sense of creative impoverishment. This helps explain why Zagajewski chose to break the first line where he did; on its own, “I haven’t written a single poem in months” would feel limp, banal.
So we arrive at yet another available function of lineation, what we might call its suggestive power. Whether “parsed” or “annotated,” a syntactically incomplete line momentarily sparks a reader’s imagination before calling it back with the next time. Scott Cairns is one contemporary proponent of this approach, identifying in the interplay between line and syntax a promising field of meaning-making set forth by the poet and explored by every new reader. Though a gifted poet will end lines deliberately, even provocatively, he cannot predetermine what meaning a reader will make with his poem.
Nor should he try, according to Cairns. In his view, one role of lineation just is to encourage multifarious impressions of the poem’s design; a great poem occasions in readers what he calls a “responsive flight of the imagination.” This accords with Longenbach’s notion of discovery, only Cairns wants to take us a step farther. For, what careful lineation helps us discover in a poem is not finally the author’s pure intentions but a meaning of our own making.
Let us return to Zagajewski’s “Transformation” as a further illustration of the annotative approach. A glance at the poem’s final shape demonstrates how annotating, unlike parsing, tends to yield lines of varying length. This not only affects the semantic-syntax tension, but also the tempo and rhythms of the poem. In his closing lines, Zagajewski’s speaker approaches a progressively narrower epiphany about his worrisome lull in inspiration:
I've seen sunflowers dangling
their heads at dusk, as if a careless hangman
had gone strolling through the gardens.
September's sweet dust gathered
on the windowsill and lizards
hid in the bends of walls.
I've taken long walks,
craving one thing only:
lightning,
transformation,
you.
Here Zagajewski’s lineation seems less concerned with the connotative reach of each end-word than with the accelerating sense of clarity conveyed in a progression of shortening lines. Read allowed (and observing the due duration of each line-break) we might also notice an inverse increase in pauses as the poem approaches its final, quiet “you.” Levertov refers to such dynamics as a poem’s melody, or “the result of pitch-patterns combined with rhythmic patterns” (Levertov 32). In these concluding lines, the melody of “Transformation” oscillates between heavy-stressed and soft-stress words: from “dangling,” “September’s,” and “lizards” to “walls” and “walks,” then back to the heavier “craving,” “lightning,” and “transformation”—all before ending, again, with the soft yet cathartic “you.”
The syntax, while not lost, is tangled with and punctuated by line-breaks, such that the poem’s cumulative effects feel as musical as they do logical. Even before one can question who this “you” refers to, the reader has, in effect, undergone the journey of imaginative transformation the poem seeks simultaneously to describe and simulate.
And perhaps music is a sensible place to close. This essay has defended a rather simple thesis: that non-metrical poets can and do have good reasons for breaking lines, and that, as a consequence, the line-break remains instrumental to free verse poetry as such. I have been prompted in part by those Formalists who would have us view non-metrical verse as essentially prose hacked up on a page, arbitrarily. The approaches to lineation explained above show this view to be mistaken. However, I do not claim that every line-break of a given poem can or should be subjected to rational criterion, whether by the poet or his critics. As with music, as with painting and all art, subjective creative intuition must also be accounted for.
A guitarist might have “good reasons” for how he writes his solo; he may even appeal to musical theories to account for his choices. But no theory can tell him which notes are the right ones; that he must learn to intuit. By the same token, not even the most classic of classical forms can absolve the poet of his duty to feel that his poem is a poem—that it bears its weight, respects its own inner logic and momentum. To borrow that line from Pascal: art, like the heart, “has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.”
Sources
Cairns, Scott. "Poetry and Further Making." Theopolis Institute, 1 Feb. 2018, https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/poetry-and-further-making/.
Cairns, Scott. “Elemental Confusion: Towards a Sacramental Poetics.” 2005, unpublished; used by permission of the author.
"T.S. Eliot on the Subject of Free Verse and Free Poetry." The HyperTexts, www.thehypertexts.com/T.%20S.%20Eliot%20reflections%20on%20vers%20libre%20free%20verse.htm. Accessed March 4, 2023.
"End-Stopped." Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/end-stopped. Accessed March 4, 2023.
Kooser, Ted. Kindest Regards: Poems. Copper Canyon Press, 2018.
Kooser, Ted. The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets. University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
Levertov, Denise. “On the Function in the Line” in Chicago Review, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Winter, 1979), pp. 30-36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25303862?origin=JSTOR-pdf. Accessed March 2, 2023.
Longenbach, James. The Art of the Poetic Line. Graywolf Press, 2008.
Oliver, Mary. Wild Geese: Selected Poems. Beacon Press, 2004.
Orr, David. Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry. Harper Perennial, 2012.
Zagajewski, Adam. Mysticism for Beginners: Poems. Translated by Clare Cavanagh. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.