Lineation: Stanza, Enjambment, Caesura

The line is the unit poetry owns

Prose has sentences; poetry has sentences and lines, and the two do not have to agree. Everything interesting in lineation comes from the gap between where the sentence wants to stop and where the line actually stops.

• End-stopped line: the line ends where the syntax ends, usually with punctuation. It feels settled, complete, sometimes flat or dogmatic.
• Enjambment: the sentence runs past the line break into the next line. The reader briefly reads the first line as a complete statement, then has that reading revised. Enjambment therefore creates two readings for the price of one, and the second one is often a correction of the first.
• Caesura: a pause inside a line, marked by punctuation or by syntax. Because the silence falls where no one was expecting it, a caesura is usually sharper than a line break.

Stanzas

Stanza shapes carry associations: the couplet (2 lines) closes and epigrammatises; the tercet (3) is unstable, always one line short of a pair of pairs; the quatrain (4) is the workhorse of English verse, especially the ballad stanza of alternating four- and three-beat lines. Uniform stanza lengths suggest control; a stanza that suddenly loses or gains lines is doing something, and you should say what.

White space

The space around a poem is part of it. An isolated single line is louder than the same words inside a block. A stanza break in the middle of a sentence forces the reader to carry the sentence across a silence — a physical enactment of separation, delay, or loss.