Preface

Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines. More than meter, more than rhyme, more than images or alliteration or figurative language, line is what distinguishes our experience of poetry as poetry, rather than some other kind of writing. Great prose might be filled with metaphors. The rhythmic vitality of prose might be so intense that it rises to moments of regularity we can scan. Its diction may be more sensuous, more evocative, than that of many poems. We wouldn’t be attracted to the notion of prose poetry if it didn’t feel exciting to abandon the decorum of lines.

But while line is central to our experience of poetry, it is notoriously difficult to talk about—much more difficult than meter, rhyme, or syntax, even though our experience of all of these poetic elements is bound up with our experience of line. What’s more, line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page. The line’s function is sonic, a way of organizing the sound of language, and only by listening to the effect of a particular line in the context of a particular poem can we come to understand how line works.

This book does not presume any long-standing familiarity with the practice of lineation. It examines metered lines, rhymed lines, syllabic lines, and a variety of free-verse lines. Along the way, it employs only a handful of familiar terms while introducing a smaller handful of new ones. Most prominently, it rejects the term “line break” as an inaccurate metaphor, preferring the term “line ending”: at the point where the line ends, syntax may or may not be broken, continuing in the next line. This is another way of saying that line cannot be understood by describing the line alone: the music of a poem—no matter if metered, syllabic, or free—depends on what the syntax is doing when the line ends.

The book’s first chapter emphasizes this point. Surveying a variety of different kinds of lines, it shows how the power of lineation arises from the relationship between the lines and the syntax of a particular poem. The second chapter examines the different ways in which lines may end, demonstrating that the power especially of free-verse lineation depends on the interaction of different kinds of line endings within the same poem. The third chapter discusses the relationship of lineated poems to prose, not only examining different kinds of prose poetry but suggesting that the very power of line asks us to wonder how it would feel to do without line.

I have tried to be descriptive, not proscriptive. Since no two lines function in exactly the same way, I offer a wide range of examples—from John Ashbery and Louise Glück to William Shakespeare and John Milton. If you find in these pages a poet who helps you to hear the work of line, read lots of poems by that poet. But if a poet I have not treated suddenly seems crucial to you, read that poet instead. On every page of this book is something I have learned by listening to others.

From “Line and Syntax”

Whatever else he is, Shakespeare is one of the great prose writers in the English language.

Beneath is all the fiend’s. There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption. Fie, fie, fie; pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, sweeten my imagination.

This is King Lear’s madness speaking. While the syntax holds steady in the second sentence (“there’s…there’s”), the diction leaps from elaborate Latinate words (sulphurous, consumption) to the most basic Anglo-Saxon words (pit, stench). A list gives way to repeated exclamation, pure sound: pah, pah. Then the disparities in diction take control of the logic: civet, apothecary, sweeten, imagination. The roaring prophet who begins this speech is in no time superseded by a courtier in search of a fine perfume.

Shakespeare’s sentences have many of the qualities we associate with the texture of great poetry (patterned syntax, varied diction, metaphorical implication, disjunctive movement), but they are not set in lines—at least they are not set in lines in one of the two earliest printings of King Lear. In the other printing, however, these sentences are set in lines. A few of the words are different, but the basic shape of the sentences remains the same.

Beneath is all the fiend’s. There’s hell, there’s darkness,
There’s the sulphury pit, burning, scalding,
Stench, consummation. Fie, fie, fie; pah, pah!
Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary,
To sweeten my imagination.

We don’t know what Shakespeare intended. One compositor set this passage as prose, the other set it as poetry; they may have been working from different manuscripts, neither of which was necessarily Shakespeare’s own. How does the division of these four sentences into four and a half lines change our apprehension of them? What procedure determines the length of the line? Does that procedure introduce arbitrary line endings, or are the line endings functional in their own right?

In this chapter I will discuss metrical lines (which follow a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables), syllabic lines (which adhere to a fixed number of syllables, whether stressed or unstressed), and free-verse lines (in which the relationship between stressed and unstressed syllables is consistently various). In every case, however the line is shaped, what will matter is not the line as such but the relationship of the line to the poem’s syntax—to the unfolding structure of the poem’s sentences. That relationship is endlessly various. Short lines or long lines don’t inevitably function in any particular way. A rhyming line doesn’t necessarily function differently from a free-verse line. In the end, line doesn’t exist as a principle in itself. Line has a meaningful identity only when we begin to hear its relationship to other elements in the poem.
Shakespeare’s lines are organized metrically. While his plays often contain passages of prose, the language of his plays is most often cast in blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter lines. That is, unrhymed lines in which there are usually five pairs of syllables: the second syllable of each pair gets more stress than the first syllable.

BeNEATH is ALL the FIEND’S. There’s HELL, there’s DARKness

None of the lines in the passage I’ve quoted from King Lear is a perfect pentameter: although it contains five stressed syllables, this line has an extra unstressed syllable hanging on to its end. The second line is missing an unstressed syllable at its beginning. And the third line scans programmatically only if we stress the syllables in an unnatural way.

Stench, CONsumMAtion, FIE, fie, FIE; pah, PAH!

No actor would say the line this way, if only because he would not give all the stressed syllables an equal amount of stress. As in all accomplished poetry, there is a tension here between the pattern and the variation. If we’ve heard a lot of iambic pentameter lines before encountering these ones, we will feel this tension as pleasure.

From The Art of the Poetic Line. Copyright 2008 by James Longenbach. All rights reserved.