Enjambment, from the French meaning “a striding over,” is a poetic term for the continuation of a sentence or phrase from one line of poetry to the next. An enjambed line typically lacks punctuation at its line break, so the reader is carried smoothly and swiftly—without interruption—to the next line of the poem.
…In her Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry, Mary Oliver explains that “When… the poet enjambs the line—turns the line so that a logical phrase is interrupted—it speeds the line for two reasons: curiosity about the missing part of the phrase impels the reader to hurry on, and the reader will hurry twice as fast over the obstacle of a pause because it is there. We leap with more energy over a ditch than over no ditch.”
That’s one reason poets use enjambment: to speed up the pace of the poem or to create a sense of urgency, tension, or rising emotion as the reader is pulled from one line to the next. Enjambed lines pique the reader’s interest—if the sentence or thought isn’t completed by the line break, one’s curiosity (where are we headed with this?) leads them down to the next line, which might complicate the previous line, expand upon it, or clarify it.
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Enjambment, from the French meaning “a striding over,” is a poetic term for the continuation of a sentence or phrase from one line of poetry to the next. An enjambed line typically lacks punctuation at its line break, so the reader is carried smoothly and swiftly—without interruption—to the next line of the poem.
ReplyDelete…In her Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry, Mary Oliver explains that “When… the poet enjambs the line—turns the line so that a logical phrase is interrupted—it speeds the line for two reasons: curiosity about the missing part of the phrase impels the reader to hurry on, and the reader will hurry twice as fast over the obstacle of a pause because it is there. We leap with more energy over a ditch than over no ditch.”
That’s one reason poets use enjambment: to speed up the pace of the poem or to create a sense of urgency, tension, or rising emotion as the reader is pulled from one line to the next. Enjambed lines pique the reader’s interest—if the sentence or thought isn’t completed by the line break, one’s curiosity (where are we headed with this?) leads them down to the next line, which might complicate the previous line, expand upon it, or clarify it.
https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-enjambment
—Jennifer Richter, “What is Enjambment?” Oregon State University: College of Liberal Arts: School of Writing, Literature, and Film, August 2, 2019
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