Line Breaks
So everybody knows - a line break is a decision a poet makes on where to end the poetic line. In prose, sentences run across the page - but in a poem, each line gets printed on page based on this decision that a poet has made. So we're going to cover what this decision means and all of its magical uses.
The decision on where to break your line may affect the poem's:
1.) SPEED
Shortening/lengthening lines can speed up or slow down the way people read. When we say "shortening/lengthening" we are talking about the number of words & syllables contained in a line.
2.) MEANING & EMPHASIS
We read English from left to right, and from the top to the bottom. Words at the end of a line seem to linger and catch our attention more and due to this, they carry more weight in meaning than words in the middle of your line.
3.) SOUND
When people read poems, they will naturally pause at the end of each line.
4.) IMPRESSIONS
Line breaks can affect how a poem looks on a page, is it light/delicate with LOTS of white space? Or is it PACKED solidly together?
There are two ways to break a line.
End-stopped
You break the line at the end of a sentence.
So each sentence becomes a new line.
This may also include breaking at natural pauses,
such as a comma,
colons, semi-colons, etc.
Enjambment
You
break
a line between its subject and
predicate, its noun and its
verb—between two
adjectives, or basically
anything
that is not end-stopped.
When sentences continue from one line to the next, an affect is created on the reader: the reader is pulled along by the poem!
This can add natural propulsion & movement to a piece as you're keeping the readers' eyes moving and guessing. Experiment with this, but be careful too, because you can trip people up or overuse it to the effect that the poem becomes unclear or difficult to read!
Imagine if you were to write a poem about the experience of dancing. Suppose you mimic the movements and sway and dizziness of the experience by just utilizing the breaks of your lines, and then, what if you were to add a strong beat and rhyme? What if you were to then make it look light and floaty on the page with lots of white space besides?
Suppose you're writing about climbing up a mountain cliff and you begin to break your lines deliberately interrupting ideas and sentences in surprising or suspenseful places?
This effect can be startling and may create an interesting "jagged/piercing" pace of reading the poem that would mirror the narrator's climb to the top.
Experiment!