Literature
Enjambment
Enjambment is a literary technique where a sentence or phrase runs over multiple lines of poetry without a pause or punctuation at the end of the line. This creates a sense of continuity and flow, allowing the meaning to carry over from one line to the next. Enjambment is often used to create tension, surprise, or to emphasize certain words or ideas within the poem.
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5 Key excerpts on "Enjambment"
eBook - PDFLanguage and Rhythm in Plautus
Synchronic and Diachronic Studies
- Benjamin Fortson(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
In particular, a sentence, clause, or other syntactic constituent can continue from the end of one line into the beginning of the next. This phenomenon is known as enjambement. It is a beloved sty- listic technique of Greek and Latin poets, as the beginning of the line is a position of prominence and emphasis. 12 But in Plautus only a small num- ber of enjambed words and phrases are clearly delayed for emphasis; the rest give the appearance of simply “spilling over” onto the following line. Given what was said above about the prosodic unity of a verse-line, enjambement becomes a very interesting area of investigation for lin- guists. If we never see, for example, prepositions at line-end with their ob- jects enjambed at the beginning of the next line, that could essentially only mean that the prosodic break corresponding to line-end was too great to allow a prosodic unit as tight as that of a PP to be split across line-end under normal circumstances. 13 Examining the ability of certain 12 In oral-formulaic poetry, this position is also a favorite place for what Parry called “adding enjambement”, the continuation of what is already a complete thought onto the next line by adding modifiers that describe some element in the preceding sentence further, e. g. oqkol]mgm at Il. 1.2 (L/mim %eide, he\, Pgkg- z\dey )wik/or/ oqkol]mgm). As this example shows, in the hands of a skilled poet, adding enjambement can be used for vertical juxtaposition of phonetically sim- ilar words (L/mim … oqkol]mgm) that reinforces the poetic message. 13 Supporters of the ictus-accent theory would claim that function words, being nor- mally destressed, were not suitable for placement under the line-final ictus; but these words are just as rare at line-end in the iambic septenarius, which does not end with an ictus.
eBook - ePubThe Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Fourth Edition
- Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul Rouzer, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul Rouzer(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
Endymion ). G. M. Hopkins’s *“sprung rhythm” introduces “roving over” (metrical and syntactic Enjambment) so that “the scanning runs on without a break from the beginning . . . of a stanza to the end.” 20th-c. poets like W. C. Williams and e. e. cummings use Enjambment so frequently that it is the rule rather than the exception in many of their poems.Since at least the mid-19th c., poets have made increased use of what is sometimes called “hard Enjambment”—Enjambment so striking it cannot help but be felt. Enjambment of this sort might include Enjambment across stanzas (as when Charles Baudelaire, speaking of how the “belly and breasts” of his mistress “advanced” toward him in “Les Bijoux” [“Jewels”], places the verb advanced at the beginning of a stanza); Enjambment separating articles or adjectives from their nouns (as in Williams’s Spring and All : “under the surge of the blue / mottled clouds driven from the / northeast—a cold wind.”); and Enjambment that splits a word across a line (as in Hopkins’s opening to “The Windhover”: “I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- / dom of daylight’s dauphin”). Perception of hard Enjambment, like the perception of Enjambment in general, depends on such factors as the reader’s experience and literary-historical context. No comprehensive taxonomy of types or effects of Enjambment exists.SeeLINE , VERSE AND PROSE , VERS , REJET.M. Parry, “The Distinctive Character of Enjambment in Homeric Verse” (1929), rpt. in Parry (1971); J. Hollander, “ ‘Sense Variously Drawn Out: Some Observations on English Enjambment,” Vision and Resonance (1973); H. Golomb, Enjambment in Poetry (1979); S. Cushman, William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure , chap. 1 (1985); R. Silliman, “Terms of Enjambment,” The Line in Postmodern Poetry , ed. R. Frank and H. Sayre (1988); A. Sanni, “On tadmin (Enjambment) and Structural Coherence in Classical Arabic Poetry,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 52, no. 3 (1989); C. Higbie, Measure and Music: Enjambment and Sentence Structure in the “Iliad” (1991); M. E. Clark, “Enjambment and Binding in Homeric Hexameter,” Phoenix 48 (1994); M. L. Shaw, “Verse and Prose,” The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry
eBook - PDFThe Evolution of Verse Structure in Old and Middle English Poetry
From the Earliest Alliterative Poems to Iambic Pentameter
- Geoffrey Russom(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Choosing words for sound echoes is rather like choosing words for a headline. In “WAR DECLARED,” for example, discarding the unstressed function word is makes the content words more salient and 14 geoffrey russom allows for use of larger headline type within the same number of column inches. In the hands of a skilled poet, sound echoes foreground key words and displace less important words to a background of routine functioning. 1.11 Line and Sentence Boundaries English poetry need not employ stanzas. Iambic pentameter can be effec- tive without rhyme, as the textbook example of Milton’s “blank verse” demonstrates. It would not be so easy to dispense with the line, the domain within which meters are generally defined. In traditional meters, line boundaries typically coincide with the boundaries of a sentence or clause. This relation between metrical and syntactic domains shows up visually in item (2), our Shakespeare sonnet, which has a comma, a full stop, or a question mark at the end of every line but one. The visually exceptional line 11 is a clause derived from a sentence by adding nor and repositioning shall before death. When line boundaries and sentence boundaries fail to coincide in iambic pentameter, we notice a certain dissonance. The term Enjambment bears witness to this effect. In a poem with short lines, however, little dissonance will be perceived if the line is realized as a phrase below the level of the sentence.
Here the first line of each couplet invariably overruns. Indeed, in the first couplet the second line itself is enjambed. The rhymes seem less important to the sense of the poem than in closed couplets, because the characteristically late breaks ensure that the rhymed words are less emphasised by the reader’s tongue. Furthermore, rhyming a nine-syllable line with one of eleven syllables (as in the first couplet) does not engender a smooth flowing couplet in the manner of Pope. Donne also feels free to scatter pauses throughout the line rather than 86 Poetry relying on the caesura, with breaks occurring as early as after the second syllable and as late as after the ninth. And the majority of lines here are either curtailed or extended in terms of their syllable count rather than being regular decasyllables. Enjambement is found in almost all kinds of metrical verse. Paradoxically, it might usefully be illustrated by an example of badly handled overrunning. The poet William McGonagall (1825 or 1830–1902), noted since the nineteenth century for his lamentable style, has a poem, ‘To Mr James Scrymgeour, Dundee’, which contains one of the ugliest examples of the device in the history of British poetry: He is a man of noble principles, As far as I can think, And the noblest principle he has got Is, he abhors the demon drink. Leaving aside the second line, which adds nothing to the poem except set up the b rhyme, and the stale cliché of the ‘demon drink’ in the last line, this stanza is metrically faulty. The break is far too early in the fourth line after the enjambement, focusing unwarranted stress upon the initial monosyllable and leaving the reader to contend with a jarring spondee (‘is / he’), a spondee which is also ungrammatical in a way that suggests simple ignorance rather than poetic licence.
eBook - PDF- John Singleton, Mary Luckhurst, John Singleton, Mary Luckhurst(Authors)
- 2000(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
The clauses and lines, and the punctuation (including layout) that marks, displays, and con-trols their relations, are primary determinants of how sense and expression build into structure: their fluidity and pressure are at the poem's heart, and the relations between grammar and form are more important than either can be alone. To begin pondering those relations, each member of the workshop group should bring in one of their own poems typed out as a continuous prose paragraph, with the line breaks and all other punctuation (commas, full stops, capital letters, etc.) left out. Swap paragraphs: and try to work out, from the prose paragraph in front of you, how the original poem was lineated and punctuated. Then compare the original and the new versions. • How did you decide where to put line breaks? and other marks/units of punctuation? 182 THE CREATIVE WRITING HANDBOOK • How are the line breaks and other marks/units of punct-uation related in each version? Are lines end-stopped (with a mark of punctuation after the last word)? or enjambed (where the sense carries over the line break)? • Have poems which originally had short lines tended to be relineated with longer lines? or vice versa? A similar exercise can be undertaken with retyped, unpunc-tuated prose versions of canonical poems; and where, as in Eliot's The Waste Land, punctuation includes the type font, spacing, and position on the page, versions in prose layout can be very extraordinary to read. What would one make, for example, of lines 273-83? the barges wash drifting logs down greenwich reach past the isle of dogs weialala leia wallala leialal a elizabeth and leicester beating oars the stern was formed a gilded shell red and gold Even with the rhyme as a guide, not, in all probability, what Eliot made of it: The barges wash Drifting logs Down Greenwich reach Past the Isle of Dogs.
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