4 258087488214533295 PDF

The Art of
EDITED BY CHARLES BAXTER

I
L
The Art of series is a new line of books reinvigorating the
practice of craft and criticism. Each book will be a brief,
witty, and useful exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or
poetry by a writer impassioned by a singular craft issue.
The Art ofvolumes will provide a series of sustained ex
amination of key, but sometimes neglected, aspects of
creative writing by some of contemporary literature's fin
est practitioners.
The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot by Charles Baxter
The Art ofAttention: A Poet's Eye by Donald Revell
The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again

by Sven Birkerts
The Art of, the Poetic Line by James Longenbach
The Art of Time in Fiction by Joan Silber
The Art ofDescription by Mark Doty
The Art ofEndings by Amy Bloom
The Art ofNarrative by Howard Norman

Other Books by James Longenbach
POETRY:
Draft of a Letter
Fleet River
Threshold
CRITICISM:
The Resistance to Poetry

Modern Poetry after Modernism
Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things
Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism
Modernist Poetics ofHistory·
The Art of the
POETIC LINE
James Langenbach
Graywolf Press
SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA
Copyright© 2008 by James Langenbach
Publication of this volume is made possible in part by a grant provided by

the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota
State Legislature; a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota; and
a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a
great nation deserves great art. Significant support has also been provided
by the Bush Foundation; Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other gener
ous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these
organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
®
n
��
.,., ... ,.,..,., ....
�
NATIONAL
ENDOWMENT
MINNESOTA FOR THE ARTS
STATE ARTS BOARD TARGET®
Clara Deland and Walt McCarthy are pleased to support the Graywolf Press
Art ofseries in honor of Brenda Deland.
Published by Graywolf Press

2402 University Avenue, Suite 203
Saint Paul, Minnesota 55114
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-488-6
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2008
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007924773
Series cover design: Scott Sorenson
Cover art: Scott Sorenson

The meaning of a poem is in the cadences and
the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought
which is given by those lines.
-George Oppen
Contents
vii Preface
3 Line and Syntax
45 Ending the Line
83 Poem and Prose
121 Further Reading
123 References
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 dis
tinguishes 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 regu
larity 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 p oetry,
it is notoriously difficult to talk about-much more dif
ficult 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 as
sociated 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
xi
xii JAMES lONGENBACH
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 fa
miliarity with the practice of lineation. It examines me
tered lines, rhymed lines, syllabic lines, and a variety of
free-verse lines. Along the way, it employs only a hand
ful 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, syn
tax 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. Sur
veying a variety of different kinds of lines, it shows how
the power of lineation arises from the relationship be
tween 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
THE ART OF THE POET.IC LINE xii i
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 Gluck 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.
THE ART OF THE
Line and Synt�x
Whatever else he is, Shakespeare is one of the great

pro::;e writers in the English language.
Beneath is all the fiend's. There's hell, there's darkness,

there is the sU°lphurous 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 syn

tax 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 syn
tax, 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
3
4 JAMES LONGENBACH
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.

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 com

p ositor set this passage as prose, the other set it as
poetry; they may have been working from different manu
scripts, 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 syl
lables, 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 ART Of THE POETIC LINE 5
the poem's syntax�to the unfolding structure of the

poem's sentences. That relationship is endlessly vari
ous. Short lines or long lines don't inevitably function
in any particular way. A rhyming line doesn't neces
sarily ,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 syl
lable 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 syl
lables in an unnatural way.
Stench, CONsumMAtion, FIE, fie, FIE; pah, PAH!

6 JAMES LONGENBACH
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 ten
sion here between pattern and variation. If we've heard a
lot of iambic pentameter lines before encountering these
ones, we will feel this tension as pleasure.
_
Counting the stresses helps us to recognize a prin

ciple that divides Shakespeare's prose sentences into
-
lines, but merely counting the stresses won't let us
understand the function of line. That's because I've so
far described the line only as an arbitrary unit: some
thing that might contain a certain pattern of stressed
and unstressed syllables. Now we need to listen to the
way in which this unit, this way of organizing the syl
lables, plays against the syntax of the sentences. Listen
to the whole of King Lear's speech, paying attention to
the varied length of the sentences in relationship to the
relatively consistent length of the lines.
When I do stare, see how the subject quakes!

I pardon that man's life. What was thy cause?
Adultery? Thou shalt not die. Die for adultery!
No, the wren goes to't, and the small gilded fly
Does lecher in my sight.
Let copulation thrive, for Gloucester's bastard son
Was kinder to his father than my daughters
"\
I['
11
THE ART OF THE POETIC LINE 7
Got 'tween the lawful sheets. To't, luxury, pell-mell,

For I lack soldiers. Behold yon simp'ring dame,
Whose face between her forks presageth snow,
That minces virtue, and does shake the head
To hear of pleasure's name:
The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't
With a more riotous appetite. Down from the waist
They're centaurs, though women all above.
But to the girdle do the gods inherit;
This speech is made of twenty-one lines, most of which

are pentameters. The speech is also made of fifteen
sentences. What is the relationship between these sen
tences and these lines? How does that relationship help
to make us hear the unfolding of the speech in one way
rather than another?
First, we may notice that the sentence and the line
are not the same thing: sometimes a single sentence
may take up a single line, but often the sentence is
either shorter than the line or longer than the line.
Second, we may notice that even though sentence and
8 JAMES LONGENBACH
line are not the same thing, there is no regular relation

ship between the sentences and the lines; the sentences
do not exceed or fall short of the line in any predict
able way. Third, we notice that the lines end differently.
Some lines end with a full stop-a period, a ques
tion mark, or an exclamation point. Others end with
a comma, a semicolon, or a colon that j oins together
two clauses or phrases within a sentence. And others
end with no punctuation at all: the syntax continues in
the next line. We might be tempted to say that the line
"breaks" at such a moment, but the line merely ends
it doesn't break. Rather than thinking about what often
gets called "line breaks;' it's more helpful to think about
"line endings": the syntax may or may not break at the
point where the line ends.
The opening line of the passage is made of one com
plete syntactical unit: the syntax does not break. The
homeless, bedraggled Lear is clinging p athetically to his
lost power, and the opening line feels like a declaration.
When I do stare, see how the subject quakes!
The second line is also syntactically complete, but it is

made of two sentences, a statement and a question.
I pardon that man's life. What was thy cause?

Then the third line, also syntactically complete, is

made of three units: a question, a statement, and an
exclamation.
Adultery? Thou shalt not die. Die for adultery!
Though we move from one to two to three syntactical

units within these lines, all three lines are end-stopped:
syntax ends where the line ends. What is the effect of
three such lines in a row?
King Lear is blinded by madness here. He imag
ines that his friend Gloucester is merely an adulterer
who has come before him for mercy, when in fact
Gloucester has literally been blinded by the husband
of one of Lear's daughters. The relationship of the
lines to the syntax does not make Lear sound mad,
however: the lines organiz� the syntax in a way that
feels balanced and coherent . Any actor reciting this
passage would be led by the relationship of the syntax
and the lines to read this passage with a strong sense
of reasonablene ss: the opening declaration (in which
syntax equals line) is superseded by lines that are di
vided logically into two and then three syntactical
units. The sound of logical thought is not inappropri
ate here, for there is a strange logic to what Lear says.
Gloucester is indeed an adulterer, and he has been
10 JAMES LONGENBACH
unable to distinguish his loyal legitimate son from his /
disloyal bastard son.

What happens to the relationship of line to syntax
as the speech progresses?
No, the wren goes to't, and the small gilded fly
Does lecher in my sight.
Let copulation thrive, for Gloucester's bastard son
W as kinder to his father than my daughters
Got 'tween the lawful sheets.
Here we have two sentences, the first of which takes

up two lines, the second of which takes up two and a
half lines . For the first time in the passage, syntax has
exceeded the end of the line, spilling into the follow
ing line. We say that such lines are "enj amb ed;' the
word "enj ambment" referring generally to lines that
end while the syntax keeps going. What is the effect of
these kinds of lines, following on the three end-stopped
lines preceding them?
First, the mere fact that these sentences are lon
ger than the ones preceding them makes us feel that
Lear's mind is in motion, launched from the runway of
the three end-stopped lines. Second, the fact that both
these sentences are enj ambed or broken across the line
introduces a formal tension to the sentences, one that
is completely lacking in the first three end-stopped lines.
Consider the effect of the first longer sentence if it were

written this way.
No, the wren goes to't. And the small gilded fly.
They lecher in my sight.
Had Shakespeare broken up the sentence, he would have

continued with the sonic decorum established by the
three opening lines of the speech, in which sentences
are short and always end where the line ends: the sound
of coherence would prevail. Instead, we move in these
lines to a new sound-the excitement of syntax over
riding the line to which it had previously been subservi
ent. It's important to recognize that no particular kind
of line has any inevitable relationship to sound or sense;
that is, an enjambment does not necessarily speed up
the line or contribute to a sense of frantic movement
in thought. But in this speech, we feel Lear's rabid en
thusiasm for his own thought increasing as the speech
unfolds, moving from one kind of relationship between
syntax and line to another relationship. This progression
is appropriate, since the impression of logic is disinte
grating as Lear speaks: we know, though Lear does not,
that Gloucester's bastard son was not kind to his father.
The disintegration continues as Lear begins to rail
at what seems to him the essentially lascivious nature
of female sexuality.
12 JAMES LONGENBACH
'
, 1.
Behold yon simp'ring dame,
Whose face between her forks presageth snow,
That minces virtue, and does shake the head
To hear of pleasure's name:
The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't
With a more riotous appetite.
Even if we don't follow Lear's sense here, we hear the

rising passion of his voice because of the increasing
tension between syntax and line within the longer
sentences. Again, the lines offer implicit instructions
to the actor: having begun by reinforcing the impres
sion of reasonableness, the sp eech should devolve into
an increasingly questionable passion. Blaming wo�n
will get Lear nowhere.
How, then, do the final lines of this speech, the lines
with which I began, sound after we've listened to this
movement from an initial trio of end-stopped lines to a
group of mostly enjambed lines?
Beneath is all the fiend's. There's hell, there's

darkness,
Here, at the end of the speech, we return to end

stopped lines. Unlike the trio of opening lines, these
lines don't all end with a full stop, but the lines are not
enjambed: some definitive turn of syntax takes place at
the moment when the line ends. The result is that we
feel we have returned to a sonic decorum similar to the
one with which we began. The speech begins firmly,
determinedly; then it grows into an enthusiasm fueled
by Lear's madness; finally it calms down again.
The opening and concluding lines have a different
effect, however, for while the concluding lines may
sound like a return to sanity, they are in fact the most
wildly associative lines in the speech: Lear is still talk
ing about the female body when he says "beneath is all
the fiend's:' Formally, the speech moves from the initial
order of syntax matching line through the excitement
of syntax exceeding line, ultimately returning to the ini
tial terms of order. But thematically, the speech moves
inexorably toward increasingly disordered thought. The
fluctuating tension between syntax and line is itself in
tension with the thematic content of the speech, and
there is no predictable relationship between the form
and the content. In other words, the passage does not
simply describe a movement of thought; it embodies
and complicates that movement through the relation
ship of syntax and line. This is what great poems do.
14 JAMES LONGENBACH
The lines I've examined so far are of course taken

from a play written in verse, not from a poem as such:
I've begun my discussion with dramatic poetry so that
I might speak freely of the passage as something we
hear. It's a commonplace to talk about the speaker of
any poem, but the notion of a speaker may or i:uay not
be useful; a poem might feel more like a concatenation
of various linguistic strands than like the utterance of a
single person. In any case, however, the sonic properties
of the poem's language are always crucial. When a poet
creates a relationship between the syntax and the lines
of her poems, she is trying to organize the language
on the page so that it corresponds to what she hears in
her head. The poet may speak the lines out loud while
composing the poem, but she generally does this to test
what is on the page against what she hears-much as a
composer turns to the piano not to discover the melody
but to confirm it. Then, once the poem is finished, its
sounds are re-created in the mind of the reader, and the
relationship between line and syntax is one of the pri
mary means through which this sonic information is
transmitted. Reading a poem out loud helps us to hear
that relationship, but poetry does not literally need to be
spoken in order to exist primarily as a sonic work of art.
Listen to the first three stanzas of a little poem by
William Carlos Williams. The syntax of the first line fol
lows from the poem's title.
To a Poor Old Woman
munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of t�em in her hand.
They taste good to her

They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her
You can see it by

the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand
By eschewing most punctuation, this poem puts

even more pressure on the relationship of syntax and
line to shape the pulse of thought. The poem's first sen
tence is made of run-on syntax; it is also heavily en
jambed. As a result, when we come to the first line of
the second stanza-
-we feel that the poem has reached a stable point after
the initial movement of the syntax through the lines.
16 JAMES LONGENBACH
But then Williams makes us think about the way we've

heard this syntactically complete line. We hear the fol
lowing line and a half differently because of the way the
syntax is broken over the line ending.
They taste good

to her
:; !
And we hear the next line and a half differently as well.
They taste
good to her
The sentence has not changed, but the relationship of

its syntax to the line has adjusted the way we hear the
sentence's pattern of intonation and stress: because of
the location of the enjambment, we hear the sentence
first as "They taste GOOD to her" and then as "They
TAST E good to her:'
Williams is altering the sound of his sentence, but
it's interesting to note that the next line of the poem
is "you can see it": we have heard the syntax in a par
ticular ways because it is arranged and rearranged on
the page in a particular ways. We know a poem is di
vided into lines because of the visual arrangement on
the page, but the function of the line is sonic. So when
we come to the final lines of the poem-
Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
-we return to the same point of syntactical stability

we encountered in the first line of the second stanza:
"They taste good to her:' But our sense of the line is
now enriched by the different ways in which this little
string of five monosyllabic words could be stressed. The
line looks the same, but we hear the line differently.
Williams's poem is written in free verse: 'that is,
rather than following a particular pattern of stressed
and unstressed syllables (as the iambic pentameter lines
of Shakespeare's blank verse more or less do), each line
has its own rhythmic identity. But just as there are many
kinds of metered verse, so are there different varie
ties of free verse. While Williams's poem depends, like
Shakespeare's, on the strategic interplay of enjambed
and end-stopped lines, Walt Whitman's free-verse lines
are almost never enjambed.
In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,

In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs,
In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,
In vain the razor-bill'd auk sails far north to Labrador,
I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of
the cliff.
18 JAMES LONGENBACH
Here, every line is a complete syntactical unit. The

poem's energy derives not from the variable tension be
tween line and syntax but from the variety of rhythmic
patterns within the line, the different patterns playing
off the steady beat of the repeated phrase that begins
each line ("In vain").
Both Whitman and Williams are creating a par
ticular relationship between line and syntax, and both
poems depend, as all poems do, on the interplay of
what changes with what stays the same-the simul
taneous creation and disruption of pattern. But the
differences between Whitman and Williams ought to
feel as prominent as the similarities between Williams
and Shakespeare: everything I've said about the fluctu- '
ating relationship of syntax and line in Williams's free
verse applies equally well to Shakespeare's blank verse.
Attention to the line tends to undermine a narrow pref
erence for one or another form of poetry, for if you can
hear what line is doing to your experience of the syn
tax in a free-verse poem, then you can hear what line is
doing in a metered poem.
It's instructive to remember that blank verse once
seemed as controversial as free verse seemed in the
early years of the twentieth century. The earliest sur
viving poetry in the Western tradition is organized in
lines. Tellingly, it was not always written down in lines,
a fact that reminds us that line is ultimately a sonic
rather than a visual element of the poem. As poetry
began to be written in vernacular languages, the addi

tion of rhyme to the line seemed to many people a bar
barity. Then, by the seventeenth century, when Milton
was writing Paradise Lost in blank verse, the deletion
of rhyme from line seemed to some people equally
barbt1rous. What does the addition of rhyme do to our
sense of the line's relationship to syntax? In what way
does rhyme alert us to the work that all lines, rhymed
or unrhymed, metered or unmetered, end-stopped or
enjambed, are performing in relationship to syntax?
The three stanzas of Donald Justice's "Nostalgia and
Complaint of the Grandparents" end with the same sen
tence: "The dead don't get around much anymore:' Like
Williams, Justice lineates the refrain differently in each
stanza, the shifting enjambment asking us to place ad
ditional stress on the syllable with which the line ends.
This version of the sentence-
The dead
Don't get around much anymore
-sounds different from this version.
The dead don't get around

Much anymore.
Unlike Williams, however, Justice draws attention to

his enjambments by marking the ends of the lines with
20 JAMES LONGENBACH
rhyme. At the end of the penultimate line of the first

stanza we emphasize the word "dead" not only because
of the enjambment but because the syllable rhymes with
"spread" in the line preceding it. The syntax urges us
forward but the allure of similar sounds pulls us back.
Our diaries squatted, toad-like,

On dark closet ledges.
Forget-me-not and thistle
Decalcomaned the pages.
But where, where are they now,
All the sad squalors
Of those between-wars parlors?
Cut flowers; and the sunlight split like soda \
On torporous rugs; the photo

Albums all outspread . . .
The dead
Don't get around much anymore.
And at the end of the penultimate line of the second

stanza we emphasize the word "get" because it rhymes
with the word "set:'
There was an hour when daughters

Practiced arpeggios;
Their mothers, awkward and proud,
Would listen, smoothing their hose
Sundays, half-past five!
Do you recall
How the sun used to loll,
Lazily, just beyond the roof,
Bloodshot and aloof?
We thought it would never set.
'Ihe dead don't get
Around much anymore.
And at the end of the third stanza we emphasize the

second syllable of the word "around" because it rhymes
with "ground:'
Eternity resembles
One long Sunday afternoon.
No traffic passes; the cigar smoke
Curls in a blue cocoon.
Children, have you nothing
For our cold sakes?
No tea? No little tea cakes?
Sometimes now the rains disturb
Even our remote suburb.
There's a dampness underground.
'Ihe dead don't get around
Much anymore.
The impact of the shifting refrain depends on the

fact that everything else about the stanza stays pretty
much the same. In each case, the second and fourth
22 JAMES LONGENBACH
lines rhyme ("afternoon" and "cocoon"), the sixth and

seventh lines rhyme ("sakes" and "cakes"), and the
eighth and ninth lines rhyme ("disturb" and "suburb").
But this complicated stanza form doesn't matter in it
self, just as the fact that Shakespeare's iambic pentame
ter line has five stresses doesn't really matter Jn itself.
What matters is the way in which the syntax of the
poem's sentences moves through these lines of varying
length. What matters is the way in which the rhymes
make us especially aware of what is happening to the
syntax at the ends of these lines. What matters is the
way in which the consistent pattern of the stanza works
against the variable grain of the sentences, forcing us
to hear their sense in a particular way. If you read the
poem out loud, your voice rises and falls not where you
like but as the lineation demands.
What's more, the power of the lineation increases
as the stanza moves forward, making the shape of the
stanza feel not like a cookie cutter but like a dramatic
linear process. Because the first and third lines of each
stanza don't rhyme, we might not immediately notice
that the second and fourth lines do, especially since the
fifth line doesn't rhyme either.
Eternity resembles
One long Sunday afternoon.
No traffic passes; the cigar smoke
Curls in a blue cocoon.

Children, have you nothing
But beginning with the sixth line, the rhymes move closer
together, increasing the tension between syntax and line,
binding the lines together more tightly at the same time
that the length of the lines begins to vary.
For our cold sakes?

No tea? No little tea cakes?
Sometimes now the rains disturb
Even our remote suburb.
These two rhymed couplets in a row prepare our ears

for the slam-dunk rhyme that shifts the way we appre
hend the stanza's final sentence-
There's a dampness underground.

The dead don't get around
Much anymore.
-but what matters here is not the simple fact that the
third stanza ends with a trimeter followed by a dimeter
line ("The dead don't get around I much anymore"), the
second stanza with a dimeter followed a trimeter ("The
dead don't get I Around much anymore"), and the first
stanza with a monometer or single-stress line followed
24 JAMES LONGENBACH
by a tetrameter ("The dead I Don't get around much

anymore"). What matters is that the same sentence is
made not only to sound slightly different in each case
but to mean something slightly different in each case.
The sound of the poem is its poignancy.
A poem like "Nostalgia and Complaint of the Grand
parents" gets called traditional because it generally em
ploys the whole poetic tool kit: rhyme, meter, and line
(as well as lots of other tools). But the best poets who
fought for the legitimacy of free verse in the early years ·
of the twentieth century were not trying to make us

choose between apparently different kinds of poetry;
they were attempting to open our ears to a wider range
of poetic possibilities. Following them, a poet like Justice '
learned as much from Williams and Pound as he did

from Shakespeare and Keats, and one of the most im
portant lessons was that the language of a particular
poem may or may not demand the whole tool kit. If
rhyme is jettisoned from a poem, what tactic must flex
its muscles in order to keep the poetic contraption in
the air? Meter. And if meter is fore sworn? Line. And if
line is abandoned? Syntax. And if syntax is abandoned?
Diction. Sometimes it will be necessary for a poet to
remember every tool in the kit; at other times it will be
equally crucial to forget them, though nothing can be
forgotten if it has not first been remembered.
Listen to seven sentences from Richard Howard's
TH E ART OF THE POETIC LINE 25
"November, 1889;' a dramatic monologue spoken by

the Victorian poet Robert Browning. The twenty-two
lines into which the sentences are divided do not fol
low a metrical pattern, and neither are they rhymed.
Curious symptoms withal

for migraine: patterns moving
over surfaces, faint
most often, fine designs
that would come as a kind of cobweb
cast iridescent upon the others, a net
intervening between me and them.
Lord! the things one sees when a fever-lit mind
grants no middle distance.
Prolixity of the real!
And just when we are grateful
for the dark, when night resumes us,
comes prolixity
of what is unreal,
the melting waxworks of our sleep
called dreams. I am against dreams,
not being one to trust
memory to itself.
In my delirium, then, I had
conviction of divided identity,
never ceasing to be two persons who
ever thwarted and opposed one another.
26 JA MES L O N GEN B A C H
In these lines, Howard's Browning describes the world

as it appears through sickness, but he also describes·
the poem in which he speaks: the poem is a net, a de- .
sign, a moving pattern through which the world is per
ceived. And if Browning initially thinks that the mind
might be cured, he eventually sees that anything we
know-the past, each other, ourselves-we apprehend
through "a net that covers the world:' How is the "net"
of this poem organized?
While the lines of "November, 1889" are not metered,
the turns of the poem's syntax are draped across an in
tricate syllabic pattern. That is, the length of the line is
determined not by counting stressed syllables but by
\
counting syllables alone, no matter if they are stressed
or unstressed; the syllables within the lines may, as in
free verse, have any particular pattern of stress. Howard
has not divided the poem into stanzas, but a repeated
pattern of fourteen syllabic lines is the building block of
the poem: a pair of seven-syllable lines is followed by a
pair of six-syllable lines, then a quatrain of alternating
nine- and eleven-syllable lines-
You can count the rest yourself. What matters here
is not the syllable count as such but, once again, the
tension between the syntax and the line endings de
termined by the count. That tension is the reason for
this pattern of lines, and the aural pleasure we take in
the poem is due to the way lines marshal the language
into patterns of assonance and alliteration ("cast iri

descent upon the others, a net") that don't necessarily
have anything to do with the already given parameters
of syntax. Line in relation to syntax, not syntax alone,
is grouping the syllables in particular ways so that we
hear'those patterns. On the rare occasions when sylla
ble count and syntax match ("Prolixity of the real!"), we
feel the thrilling absence of the endless spill of enjamb
ment that otherwise thrills us because of the way it de
termines intonation and stress. Were the line�merely_
'�<?as� lE!��en!,,�lLQ!h�n;:' .!h�ElUX��J�-.��2 _ten.:
sion, no rising of the voice to_wJl�erminal syllable
"net:' whic�_g�shes21s forwa��_!0_��.��.� ��}�(��
tugs us bad�-!�-!��.��!):�. gJ_��!!.�C�n�L>sc�i;'
I've said that "November, 1889" does not rhyme, at
least in the conventional way-rhyming words placed
at the ends of the lines. But there is enough sonic echo
in the poem to make us mark the final syllables of cer
tain lines with particular emphasis. I've also said that
the poem is not metgx�.di.hutit's.imp_Qit�nUo note
___..____-=��-"-"��-"-"'•- � •
- -.....� that
__,Nr......_ , ·�"'"-
a_syn�act��,IJy_�S.Q!P.J?l�t�Jin�JnJh�§ ..P.9=�.!!1.J':�EEJi�l.!1_9..� doe_'!o,

the real!") �� Ji}5�., �-,.��s,t.iJJ.gpoiJJ.tjµ�!.3:.s �""�Y!l:!�S:.!!: A<e�.f(:-
_ � - _ .
cally com_pl�.!�..!!!1:� .�g_e�. �oth in S hal<espe,�r�:��ter� ��-;1� ;� s

��!-"�.e, ("When I do stare, see how the subject quakes!")
.
�:�'<'/�,c
·�11
I r"'e\-· '
and m W'll' i iams's free verse ("They taste good to h er " ) . r-1 /.,..�. h+ 111 ·;;_ �
-"·'
l.«"·q,., '•·.J
These three ways of thinking about the line in itself- ,.�'::::!?
i.,,·
metered verse, syl�abic�_:��:�.!:��!se-have different

c _ .J
28 JAMES LONGENBACH
effects, but in any case the line exists not because it has
a certain pattern of stresses, a certain number of syl- .
!ables, or an irregular number of stresses and syllables:
the line exists because it has a relationship to syntax.
You might say that a one-line poem doesn't really have
anything we can discuss as a line, except ina�much as
we feel its relationship to lines in other poems. We
need at least two lines to b�gin to hear how the line is
functioning.
Lines can be short, as in Robert Herrick's "Upon His'
Departure Hence:'
Thus I
Passe by
And die:
As One,
Unknown,
And gon:
I'm made
A shade,
And laid
I' th grave,
There have
My Cave.
Where tell
I dwell,
Farewell.
TH E ART OF THE POETIC LINE 29
Lines can be long, as in this passage from William Blake's

"The Book of Tuel:'
Why a Tongue impress'd with honey from every wind?

Why an Ear, a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in?
Why a Nostril wide inhaling terror, trembling, &
affright?
Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy?
Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?
And lines can be even longer than that, as in this pas

sage from Allen Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra:'
I walked the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat

down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific
locomotive to look at the sunset over the box
house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron
pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts
o f the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,
surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees
of machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun
sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that
stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves
rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums on the
riverbank, tired and wily.
30 JAMES LONGENBACH
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray

shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry
on top of a pile of ancient sawdust-
-I rushed up enchanted-it was my first sunflower,
memories of Blake-my visions-Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes
Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, blank
treadles tires forgotten and unretreaded, the
p oem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel
.
knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and
the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past . . .
The danger with Herrick's manometer (or single-stress)

lines, grouped in rhymed triplets, is that the line end
ings manipulate the syntax with such rapidity that
the poem seems tricky. And the danger with Blake's
fourteeners (or seven-stress lines) is that the line may
too easily break in two, making the lines sound like
the more familiar ballad meter: alternating four- and
three-stress lines. And the danger �with Ginsberg's at-
��,1f�!:�ers�)�ne�.)�_!h�-��Y-fil!gh!_s__top func
tioni�[ll;§...U!!�1i1�ITt�!nlliin.ing_!}QJ,J.�tti�Jt.lac r__elationship_
to the �}'I!iax,. But Herrick's quietly natural syntax keeps
his poem from feeling merely like a feat. And Blake's
repositioning of the caesura (or pause) within each line
prevents his fourteeners from breaking into regu-
T H E ART OF T H E P O ET I C L I N E 31
lar pieces, while his repetition of a syntactical pattern

plays against the irregularity. And the first three lines of
§.!E�sb�rg�_E<:>�� all of the� sx�!�£!!s�HY"S2X!11?l�i��,��
tablish a stable relati?nship between line and syntax� a
-- � �
��sh�µg - �p �d
� tatic · fourth ��i�I{�c; -�,�
.
f��: t�� ..
j;�bed ��,-;�:v-��a'i H·ii��.··Th�0i�- �gth-"�£"th;"Ii;�"J;;"�

�_..,,._.� .=.-.:!:J:::..::-"_,.-...,....,..._-.,_ �:"_:._•::'.>-•i->.•-�,, •H .-, �· '· --co'__._,., '.";i--.'f'.c� ,v_r.;L-..,:_��·cG1'=1c-....:.=-·�h ;-O-':Lloo'.:�'' •r;'1. �_1r:_.· •y7··.;�.Li::'.. \..c�lof ,,.,.. 'cr. �'=·�·,.':.•.' ...'. �,,:_,. '--'-''-'---O·---•.c :•;_
�J!ll!§g,!fJ1�I\'.'�J�J�-�t!diGt<!Ple�ffecL.
Nor does the variation of the length of the line within
a single poem, as in this rhymed and metered stanza
from George Herbert's "The-Collar:'
I struck the board, and cry'd, No more.

I will abroad.
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the rode,
Loose as the winde, as large as store.
Or in this rhymed and syllabic stanza from Marianne

Moore's "The Past is the Present:'
If external action is effete

and rhyme is outmoded,
I shall revert to you,
Habakkuk, as on a recent occasion I was goaded
into doing, by XY, who was speaking of
unrhymed verse.
32 JAMES LONGENBACH
Or in this free-verse passage from George Oppen's "Of

Being Numerous:'
Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man's

way of thought and one of his dialects and what
has happened to me
Have made poetry
· To dream of that beach

For the sake of an instant in the eyes·,
The absolute singular
The unearthly bonds

Of the singular
Which is the bright light of shipwreck
In each of these passages the lines feel inevitable, not

because the author has made a decision to use a long
line or a short line or a mixture of long and short lines:
the length of the line establishes a relationship to the
syntax, and that relationship is guided by the author's �
sense of how the syntax should be paced-how the

given syllables of the words should be organized so that
we hear the pattern of their stresses in one way rather
than another way.
Oppen begins with a line that, like Ginsberg's line in

"Sunflower Sutra;' is so very long that it threatens to flat
ten out into prose, the relationships between its stressed
syllables all but lost in a welter of unstressed syllables.
Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man's

way of thought and one of his di'alects and what
has happened to me
But by following this line with a line almost as short

as Herrick's, a line whose brevity is emphasized by the
unexpected rhyme between the final syllable of its final
word ("poetry") and the final syllable of the long line
preceding it ("me")-
Have made poetry
-Oppen suddenly tightens the rhythmic texture of the

poem. This line feels epigrammatic not only because
of what it says but because we now hear stress<:;�d syl
lables in close proximity to one another: "Have MADE
POetry:' As a result, these lines seem to enact what the
sentence is about: the lines make poetry, moving from
a tenuous concatenation of ingredients to a terse dec
laration of purpose.
The subsequent lines of the passage enact a similar
movement between constriction and release. Following
34 JAMES LONGENBACH
a group of short enjambed lines that in this case em

body the hesitancy of the process of thought-
The absolute singular
The unearthly bonds

Of the singular
-the final line sounds like a resting place because its

greater length allows for syntactical completion and a
more resonant pattern of stressed syllables.
Which is the BRIGHT LIGHT of SHIPwreck
The two stresses in the middle of the line are not only
wedged against each other without any intervening ·
unstressed syllables, they also rhyme with each other:

"bright light:' Then the vowel in the final stress of the
line ("ship") pulls our ears back to the. vowel sound in
the first two syllables of the line ("which is"). In con
trast to the lines preceding it, this line feels balanced, a
completed pattern of sound. So while the opening lines
of this passage feel satisfying because of the movement
from a very long line to a very short line, the final lines
. feel satisfying because of the movement from a se
quence of short lines to a longer line.
Though we may not notice it at first, rhyme plays
T H E A RT O F T H E P O E T I C L I N E 35
just as important a role in Oppen's lines as it does in

Herbert's metered lines or Moore's syllabic lines. And
though the length of Oppen's lines is not det�rmined
by the counting of stresses or syllables, there is noth
ing casual about the number of stresses and syllables
in each of his lines. -- Deciding where the line should end
�---�-�- ..::&!l!i:C""""""':.ui:if...,EJ->��ti".:t-,i,.c.,_"-''-'-'•
��,.�-.;�.�,�:�-Y.�E�,��E2-t;��. �lg}}! .J.�l!!�!IL�:.�.�---T.��-�-·-�y�t.�.:

rious than in...a.. metered. . .. or svllabic
J_
�-�·�...;....,_c:-·-... •. ..,__,_._.:1.-.:.,_
-�-�-,>��·�· . fact. .
noem, but ,,.in
_,__,.�-·r ,_._ . ,�-',L,, ,,_,.,_!J.:._,.,.; '·-·" __.LC_;--.. _.....,-, "'_,,,,_ '· ·�· .:...,�. _i.£..�_,�,,,_,_. , ___ :·.i ::� �.r.._,_.· ·.r-.:•.�_,_,_�,;,_n� . _�
!t iS..E��;"��,�!�.�E ..?E,H2tlh�Jir& ..�11qil):gJ�..£�.t-�Efl1�9E!9.

. �I��1:��!E�EXS9U.�Jr.��J}!?Jh�. U,��. ,��"�i,��.��t;'!. .h�Y�. �.
P.0��E!�U11gctl9p.}�nle�.�.,,w.:�.h��r.it Pl�yiµg,ptf th� SYf1 . �-.
�.��-�1:_!_elationship t,o oJh�x1L11�J�n9:_i[lg�.

Reconsider the end of King Lear's speech.
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.
Here, I've lineated the sentences that are sometimes

printed as Shakespeare's prose, but instead of organiz
ing the language in iambic pentameter lines, I've made
lines that encourage us to hear variations from that pat
tern of stressed and unstressed syllables. To hear the first
line as a pentameter-
36 JAMES LONGENBACH
Beneath is all the fiend's. There's hell, there's darkness
-is to hear the syntax rise to the final word of the line
("darkness") and fall away onto the next phrase: "There
is the sulphurous pit:' In contrast, to hear the first line
as a syntactically complete declaration follo�ed by a
triplet of parallel phrases in the second line-
"Beneath is all the fiend's.

There's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit.
-is to hear the syntax rise from "hell" to "darkness" to

"pit" in a line that is not only syntactically complete but
also more syntactically complex. As my version contin
ues, the next line moves from three parts (hell, dark
ness, pit) to four-
Burning, scalding, stench, consumption-
-and I've taken the liberty of concluding this line with

a dash that pushes us forward to the fifth line's five
monosyllabic words: "fie, fie, fie; pah, pah!" Then, in the
final two lines, I've introduced the first and only en
jambment in a passage in which syntax and line have
been equivalent.

T H E A RT OF T H E P O E T I C L I N E 37
Enjambment is not in itself valuable: like everything

else in a poem, its power depends on its relationship to
other formal aspects of the poem-more specifically,
the nature of the line endings surrounding it. I might
have chosen to lineate the final sentence this way.

Sweeten my imagination.
Or this way.
Give me an ounce of civet,

Good apothecary, sweeten my imagination.
But by introducing the strong enjambment-

-I've broken the pattern established by the earlier

lineation and introduced a moment of formal tension
as the passage concludes. The syntax of the penulti
mate line feels balanced, since its final word alliter
ates strongly with its initial word ("Give me an ounce
of civet, good"); at the sar:n.e time the syntax feels bro
ken, the line ending pushing us to the concluding line
with a force that has not hitherto been utilized in the
passage. Because the line ends on the adjective "good;'
38 JAM E S lONGENB ACH
we tend to put more stress on that syllable than we

would if it were followed in the line by the noun it modi
fies: "apothecary:'
GIVE me an OUNCE of CIVet, GOOD
As a result, we hear the alliteration of "good" with "give"

more powerfully, just as we hear the rhyme between the
two other stressed syllables in the line ("give" and "civ").
Our ears are pulled back to the beginning of the line by
similar sounds, and at the same time they are pushed
forward to the next line by the strong enjambment.
Sonic echo is working with line in order to determine ; .
the particular way we hear the syntax.
There is not necessarily one way to do this.
Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, sweeten

My imagination.
This arrangement sacrifices what to my ear is the more

attractively complex music of a line whose syntax feels 1
both balanced and broken; but this attenuation of the

penultimate line, ending with an even more dramatic
enjambment on the verb ("sweeten"), is worth consid
ering. In fact, I wouldn't have settled on my preferred ar
rangement without considering it. The weighing of such
alternatives goes on in the composition of any line,
T H E ART OF T H E P O E T I C L I N E 39
whether or not its length is determined by a metrical

or syllabic pattern. Robert Frost once said rather imp
ishly that writing free verse is like playing tennis with
the net down; in fact, writing any kind of poem is more
like playing tennis on a court in which the net is in mo
tion at the same time that the ball is in motion.
Listen finally to the opening lines of "Nostos;' a free
verse poem by Louise Gluck. The title is the Greek word
for homecoming.
There was an apple tree in the yard

this would have been
forty years ago-behind,
only meadow. Drifts
of crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at the window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor's yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
For relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
40 JAMES LONGENBACH
the role of the tree for decades

taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from the tennis courts-
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
This passage is made of twenty-one lines. It is also made

of nine sentences, some of which are syntactlcally in
,
complete, the first of which is a run-on sentence. As in
the· pentameter version of the passage from King Lear,
there is no regular relationship between the sentences
and the lines. The sentences do not exceed or fall short
of the lines in a predictable way, and neither is the way
in which the lines end predictable: some end with a full r' .
stop, others with a comma or a dash, and still oth� rs

with no punctuation at all. But like King Lear's speech,
Gliick's poem begins with a syntactically complete line.
It proposes the presence in the past of something that
no longer exists in the present, and it could not do so
in more plainly.
There was an apple tree in the yard
Following this moment of sonic stability, however, the '

poem not only describes a more tenuous process of
thought, it also makes us hear the shifting hesitancy of
the process in lines that disrupt our natural apprehen
sion of the syntax.
THE ART OF THE POETIC L I N E 41
Substitution
of the immutable
for relentless earth.
So while we hear the sound of certainty at the begin

ning of the poem ("There was an apple tree"), we feel
here the evolving drama of discovery as that certainty
unravels. Unlike Shakespeare, Gluck is dramatizing the
encroachment not of madness but of self-doubt, and
in both cases the lineation is determining the pulse of
thought, the interplay of different kinds of line end
ings creating different ways of apprehending syntax as
thinking. Not this-
What do I know of this place,

The role of the tree for decades taken by a bonsai,
Voices rising from the tennis courts
-but this: lines that become a runway for the sonic

boom of revelation with which the poem concludes.
What
1
1
j
42 JAMES LONGENBACH l

1
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut. j
As one expects of a lyric poet. 1
l
We look at the world once, in childhood. �
The rest is memory. l
Here, at the end of "Nostos;' we return to syntactically

complete lines: the opening line makes an observation
1
1
about the past, and the three concluding lines offer a l
sequence of declarations about the mental processes 1
l
through which we come to understand the relationship
between the past and the present. In between, the en
1J
jambed sentences embody th.at wayward process. i
As is the case in Lear's speech, however, these con
cluding lines have a different effect from the syntacti
cally complete line with which the poem opens. At the
beginning of "Nostos;' the confluence of syntax and
line suggests a security about knowledge and memory
that the poem persists to unravel; in retrospect, that
security sounds unexamined, the plain declaration of
existence weirdly na'ive: "There was an apple tree:' At
the end of the poem, in contrast, the confluence of syn
tax and line sounds rueful, the hard-won product of
thought rather than a declaration masking the neces
sity of more thinking: "As one expects of a lyric poet:'
It's not that the poem has concluded by saying any
thing particularly challenging: one has only to imagine
T H E A R T O F T HE P OET I C L I NE 43
a poem beginning with the line "We look at the world

once, in childhood" to feel that the poem is thrilling
because of the way it moves to its concluding wisdom,
not because of the wisdom as such. The line is no ar
bitrary unit, no ruler, but a dynamic force that works
in c0njunction with other elements of the poem: the
syntax of the sentences, the rhythm of stressed and un
stressed syllables, and the resonance of similar sounds.
So far, I've spoken of lines as enjambed and end
stopped, but because the line's effect depends on the
variable qualities of the poem's other elements, there
may be different kinds of enjambment, different ways
in which the syntax breaks across the end of the line.
There are also different ways in which a line might be
end-stopped. Finally, there are as many discriminations
to be made as there are lines in poems. The next chap
ter will propose a few broad categories.
]
l
Ending the Line
"At a particular time, at a particular date, in a par

ticular room;' remembered Ezra Pound, "two authors,
neither engaged in picking the other's pocket, decided
that the dilution of vers libre . . . had gone too far and
that some counter-current must be set going:' The time
was around 1917; the two authors, Ezra Pound and T. S.
Eliot. To them, modernist free verse had already entered
its decadence. It was being written thoughtlessly, flac
cidly, and the counter-current was soon to appear in
Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and Eliot's little book
called simply Poems: rhymed quatrains.
Listen to a passage from Pound's Mauberley.
Thick foliage
Placid beneath warm suns,
Tawn fore-shores
Washed in the cobalt of oblivions;
Or through dawn-mist
The grey and rose
Of the juridical
Flamingoes;
45
46 J A M E S LO N G E N B A C H
]
J
A consciousness disjunct,
Being but this overblotted
Series
Of intermittences;
Coracle of Pacific voyages,

The unforecasted beach;
Then on an oar
Read this:
"I was
And I no more exist;
Here drifted
An hedonist:'
Pound's quatrains are generally rhymed X A X A (the

second and fourth lines rhyming with each other while
the first and third remain unrhymed), but the lines fol
low no regular meter: the regularly rhymed lines con
tain a fluctuating number of stresses-as few as one or
as many as five. Nor do the lines ever scan in exactly
the same way. The relationship of stressed to unstressed (
syllables also fluctuates, and even the lines that flirt with
the rhythm of the pentameter-
CORacle OF paCIFic VOYagES

T H E A R T O F T H E P O ET I C L I N E 47
-don't have a metrical context in which they truly func

tion as pentameter lines. The poem sets up an expecta
tion for a repeated pattern and simultaneously disrupts
that expectation, and we are consequently asked to hear
more stresses in certain lines than are actually there.
Listening to the final quatrain, for instance, we may ex
pect three stresses in the final line (''An hedonist") so
that it matches the three firm stresses in the second line,
with which it rhymes so crisply.
And I no MORE exIST.
As a result, we put an unnaturally heavy stress on the

first syllable of the final line ("an") and feel a gaping
caesura or pause between this syllable and the next,
which also needs to be stressed.
AN HEdonIST
The line floats away, drawn out in a languorous hesi

tancy much like the sensibility the poem describes.
It's sometimes said that a poet would be well served
by mastering the techniques of meter and rhyme be
fore tackling free verse, just as it's said that a painter
ought to master representational techniques before
delving into abstraction. But these lines from Hugh
! 48 J A M ES LON G E N BACH
,, '
!,
Selwyn Mauberley demonstrate an equally plausible

wisdom: the extraordinary rhythmic delicacy, which ·
depends on the control of the line, could not have been
achieved without an ongoing devotion to the craft of free
verse. For at the same time that they turned to rhymed
quatrains, Eliot and Pound also continued to write free
verse: their countercurrent announced that the quality
of a poem had nothing to do with the form it happened
to take. Once revolutionary, free verse had quickly be
come an orthodoxy, a set of formal procedures that
might be employed as ineptly or as brilliantly as rhymed
quatrains. But this judgment rests on the wonder of
achievement: in just a few years free verse had become
as powerful an instrument as rhymed quatrains.
The achievement was bigger than Pound and Eliot ·
sitting in a particular room in a particular time. Work

ing beside them, Williams, Moore, and Stevens devel
oped a variety of distinctive free-verse lines, each of
which is determined by a particular manner of ending
the line, each of which may produce different effects
in relationship to different kinds of syntax or patterns
of stress. The variety of effects is potentially infinite. <
Here, I will focus on the shifting effects of three ways

of ending the line: annotating lines, parsing lines, and
end-stopped lines. I will begin by describing poems
that adhere fairly closely to one kind of line ending, but
ultimately I want to show how the power of free verse
T H E ART O F T H E P O E T I C L I N E 49
most often depends on the interplay of these different

kinds of line endings.
Consider first the kind of free-verse lines Pound
was writing at around the same time that he wrote the
quatrains of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.
And all that day

Nicea moved before me
And the cold grey air troubled her not
For all her naked beauty, but not the tropic skin,
And the long slender feet lit on the curb's marge
And her moving height went before me,
We alone having being.
And all that day, another day:
Thin husks I had known as men,
Dry casques of departed locusts
speaking a shell of speech . . .
Propped between chairs and tables . . .
Words like the locust-shells, moved by no inner being;
A dryness calling for death.
While the 1ines of Mauberley tend to be short and heav

ily enjambed, Pound's characteristic. free-verse line tends
like Whitman's to be syntactically complete. A strong
punctuation mark almost always occurs at the end
of the line, and on the few occasions when -it doesn't,
the line ending makes more emphatic the normative
50 JA M E S LO N G E N B A C H
turn of syntax: "departed locusts I speaking a shell of

speech:' Having drastically reduced the tension be
tween syntax and line, Pound inevitably tends toward a
longer line, a line built from a variety of smaller units of
syntax, a line that privileges its self-contained rhythmic
pattern over the poem's forward momentum. Almost
every line I've quoted from Canto V II scan� differently
from the one before it, but all the lines sou�d exactly
like· Pound.
Listen in contrast to the characteristic free-verse line
of Williams's Spring and All.
The sunlight in a A
yellow plaque upon the p.._
varnished floor �
is full of a song t
inflated to �
fifty pounds pressure \
at the faucet of -{\

June that rings A:
the triangle of the air'{
pulling at the �·
anemones in �
Persephone's cow pasture- :tz
T H E A R T OF T H E P O E T I C L I N E 51
When from among

The steel rocks leaps
J. P. M.
who· enjoyed'
exi:raordinary privileges
among virginity
to solve the core

of whirling flywheels
by cutting
the Gordian knot

· with a Veronese or
perhaps a Rubens-
Williams bends his syntax relentlessly across the line,

and the line endings generally do not perform the work
of punctuation or emphasize the turns of normative
syntax. While the rhythmic vitality of Pound's line is due
to the variety of syntactical patterns within it, Williams
uses enjambment to determine the placement of rhyth
mic stress, playing the irregularity of his line endings
against the chaste decorum of his three-line stanzas.
Having capitalized on the tension between syntax and
line, Williams inevitably tends toward a shorter line,
one narrow enough to exclude almost any suggestion
52 J A M ES LON G E N BACH
of syntactical pattern ("varnished floor"; "the Gordian

knot"; "]. P. M:').
Sometimes the enjambment throws emphasis on the
beginning of the line: here, the first two lines end with
unstressed syllables, and the line endings encourage us
to give additional emphasis to the stressed syll�ble with
which the second and third lines begins ("YELlow";
"VARnished").
The sunlight in a
yellow plaque upon the
varnished floor
At other times, Williams throws emphasis on the end

of the line by concluding with a heavily stressed syllable
and beginning the next line with an unstressed syllable
("SONG I in").
is full of a song
,
inflated to
By holding us back, these lines keep us racing forward.

And if the static quality of Pound's end-stopped line
feels appropriate to his characteristic subject (the re
turn of ancient spiritual presences to a timeless pres
ent), W:illiams's rush of blunt enjambments feels crucial
to his: the threat of ]. Pierpont Morgan's antiquarian
taste to the energy of contemporary art.
T H E ART O F T H E P O E T I C L I N E 53
Williams's enjambments follow one another with a

rapidity that may feel overwhelming, but the nature of
many of his line endings is not different from one vari
ety of Milton's. For Satan, Milton explains in Paradise
Lost, conscience
wakes the bitter memory

Of what he was, what is, and what must be
-or so we might reason, stopping at what appears to

be a concluding point of syntax at the end of the pen
tameter line; but the syntax continues.
Of what he was, what is, and what must be

Worse.
This enjambment provides both the stillness of a com:

pleted clause and the thrill of discovering that the syn
tax continues. The lines sound like a discovery because
the second line begins with a heavily stressed syllable
a stress that takes us by surprise, since we expect an
unstressed syllable at the beginning of this iambic pen
tameter line.
John Hollander has said that Milton's enjambments
"annotate" his syntax. That is, rather than following the
grammatical units, the lines cut against them, anno
tating the syntax with emphasis that the syntax itself
would not otherwise provide. The same thing may be
54 J A M E S LON G E N B A C H
said of the lines in Spring and All, and the achieveme?t

was not easily won. Consider one of the many poems
called "Pastoral" that Williams wrote in the earlier years
of his career: rather than cutting up the syntax into un
expected or fragmentary pieces, as the annotating lines
do in Spring and All, these lines generally coI?-tain· co
herent pieces of syntax.
The old man who goes about

Gathering dog lime
Walks in the gutter
Without looking up
And his tread
Is more majestic than
That of the Episcopal minister
Approaching the pulpit
Of a Sunday.
Meanwhile
The little sparrows
Hop ingenuously
About the pavement
Quarreling
Over those things
That interest them
With sharp voices
But we who are wiser
Shut ourselves in
On either hand
And no one knows

Whether we think good
Or evil.
These things
Astonish me beyond words!
J. V. Cunningham once said that lines like these "parse"

the syntax of a poem. That is, while the lines are not
end-stopped, they generally follow the normative turns
of the syntax, breaking it at predictable points rather
than cutting against it. While the more aggressive an
notating line asks us to stress syllables we wouldn't or
dinarily stress-
The sunlight in a
yellow plaque upon the
varnished floor
-the parsing line tends to emphasize the given contour,

of the sentence, reinforcing the way it would sound if it
were written out as prose.
And no one knows

Whether we think good
Or evil.
These things
Astonish me beyond words!
]
J
Neither a parsing nor an annotating line is inevitably

preferable; there is nothing wrong or right about any
particular way of ending the line. But by placing line so
utterly in service of syntax, reducing the tension be
tween syntax and line, a poem dominated by the parsing
line can make its own lineation seem increasingly un
necessary. Without the drama of discovery provided by
more radically annotating lines, Williams must end the
1
early·"Pastoral" with an inflated sense of closure: "These
things I Astonish me beyond words!" He has discovered
here his characteristic subject matter and diction (both
strategically plain), but he has not yet discovered a way
]
J
to make the poem enact his feeling of astonishment.
The final lines of the poem from Spring and All
make the same point as the final lines of "Pastoral"
(little things may be as astonishing as a capitalist's ac
quisition of a Veronese), but the sentiment no longer
feels contrived. It feels integral to the poem rather than
layered onto it.
And so it comes
to motor cars
which is the son
leaving off the g

of sunlight and grass
Impossible
to say, impossible ·
to underestimate
wind, earthquakes in
Manchuria, a
p2.rtridge
from dry leaves
Even as it concludes, this poem is all motion, a careen

ing sequence of metaphors of things in motion, .the
confidant repetitions of "impossible" at the end of the
line giving way to line endings that annotate the syntax
in increasingly edgy ways: "earthquakes in I Manchura,
a I partridge:' The excessive use of the annotating line
can come to seem mannered or fussy, a way of jazzing
up uninteresting syntax, just as the excessive use of the
parsing line can come to feel dull, a way of merely re
peating what the syntax is already doing on its own. But
in these lines from Spring and All, Williams's playfulness
is functional. His aggressively annotating lineation-the
division of articles from nouns, syllables from words, let
ters from syllables-drives not only the movement but
the content of the poem: the "sunlight" is full of '·'song"
and Morgan's motorcars are the "son I leaving off the
g" of the word "song" (or "son I g"), which is "sunlight:'
Williams suggests by the free association of syllables that
industrial culture may be astonishing after all.
58 J A M ES LO N G E N B A C H
These annotating lines could not be more differ

ent from Pound's end-stopped lines or Williams's ear
lier parsing lines. What changed Williams's prosody
so radically in such a short time? What allowed him to
distinguish syntax from line independent of grammati
cal units? Listen to the opening stanzas of Marianne
Moore's "The Fish:'
the Fish
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow blue mussel shells, one
keeps
adjusting the ash heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the
side
of the wave cannot hide
there; for the submerged shafts of the
sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swift-
ness
II
Ii , . i
�
T H E ART OF T H E POETIC L I N E 59
into the crevices

in and out, illuminating
the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a
wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff, whereupon the stars,
pink
rice grains, ink
bespattered jelly-fish, crabs like
green
lilies and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.
Like the lines I examined from Richard Howard's "No

vember, 1886;' these lines are organized syllabically: the
six lines of each stanza contain (in order) one, three,
eight, one, six, and eight syllables. Only a handful of the
lines are end-stopped, and few of them could be said to
be parsing the poem's syntax. Instead, the lines range
from the kind of enjambment Milton employed-
of the wave cannot hide

there
60 J A M ES LO N G E N BAC H
-to the more aggressively annotating line that Williams

began to favor in Spring and All, partly because of
Moore's example.
The barnacles which encrust the

side
In addition, the poem is also rhymed (A A X B B X),

rriaking the ends of these annotating lines even more
palpably audible and consequently forcing us to place
strong accents on syllables that we would otherwise be
at liberty to neglect. The effect of the lineation of the /
first two lines-
wade
through black jade
-is familiar from the irregularly metered and rhymed

lines of Robert Frost's "After Apple Picking;' where
meter and rhyme conspire to mark the end of the line
more insistently.
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

For all
That struck the earth
But the effect of "an I injured fan" or "ness I into the

crevices" pushes a familiar principle to an extreme,
T H E ART O F T H E POETIC L I N E 61
highlighting unexpected syllables and slowing down the

poem's momentum. "Marianne's words remain sepa
rate;' said Williams in one of the prose sections of Spring
and All, "each unwilling to group with the others except
as they move in the one direction�'
At times, Moore's and Williams's lines annotate the
syntax so radically, dividing words into syllables, that
the line endings can threaten to seem arbitrary rather
than functional. But unlike Frost, Moore and Williams
sometimes want their formal gestures to feel more cal
culated than organic: rather than allowing us to take
the formal procedures of art for granted, they want us
to feel the imposition of pattern on language, and that
imposition forces us to ask questions we might profit
ably ask of any poem, nQ matter how natural or inevita
ble its procedures might seem. How can one tell when
the effect created by the relationship between syntax
and line is driven by necessity? How can one make ar
bitrariness itself a necessity?
Consider the opening five;-line stanzas of Moore's
"When I Buy Pictures:'
When I Buy Pictures
or what is closer to the truth, when I look at

that of which I may regard myself as the
imaginary possessor, I fix upon that which
would
62 J A M E S LON G E N BACH
give me pleasure in my average moments: the

satire upon curiosity,
in which no more is discernible than the
intensity of the mood;
or quite the opposite-the old thing, the medi

aeval decorated hat box, in which there
are hounds with waists diminishing like the
waist of the hour-glass
and deer, both white and brown, and birds and
seated people; it may be no more than a
square
of parquetry; the literal biography perhaps
in letters stand-
ing well apart upon a parchment-like expanse;

or that which is better without words, which means
just as much or just as little as it is understood to
I
mean by the observer-the grave of Adam,
prefigured by himself; a bed of beans
or artichokes in six varieties of blue; the snipe
legged hiero-
II
glyphic in three parts; it may be anything. i
In contrast to the syllabic design of " The Fish;' the syl

labic design of "When I Buy Pictures" produces a stanza
made of extremely long lines: the syllable counts of the

lines in each .stanza are twelve, eleven, fifteen, twenty
one, and eighteen. Since the line endings consequently
occur much less frequently throughout the ongoing
movement of the syntax, it's harder to hear what the
endings are doing to the syntax, and, as a result, the
lines feel more arbitrary, an imposition on the poem's
syntax rather than a strategic alteration of its move
ment. Similarly, although the poem is rhymed, it's al
most impossible to hear the rhymes: the fact that the
opening stanza rhymes "the" _ (or "thee") with "curios
ity" is undetectable unless we notice the slightly stron
ger rhymes placed in the same positions in subsequent
stanzas (in which "there" rhymes more obviously with
"square" and "means" with "beans"). It's consequently
hard to say that the line endings in "When I Buy Pictures"
annotate the syntax because their effect seems willfully
arbitrary.
Or should I say delightfully arbitrary? In itself, the
arbitrary is not a problem: there must be room for
such effects in poetry. But even the arbitrary must be
driven by necessity, and necessity can be judged only
on a poem by poem basis: what does the language of
this particular poem require at this particular junc
ture? Moore asked this question of herself, for when
she reprinted "When I Buy Pictures;' she discarded
its syllabic design, buried its rhymes, and recast the
64 J A M E S LO N G EN BACH
poem in an end-stopped line that is distinctively her

own-a line that sounds nothing like Pound's end
stopped line.
When I Buy Pictures
or what is closer to the truth,

. when I look at that which I may regard myself as the
imaginary possessor,
I fix upon what would give me pleasure in my average
moments:
the satire upon curiosity, .in which no more is
discernible than the intensity of the mood;
or quite the opposite-the old thing, the mediaeval
decorated hat-box,
in which there are hounds with waists diminishing
like the waist of the hour-glass
and deer and birds and seated people;
it may be no more than a square of parquetry; the
literal biography perhaps-
in letters standing well apart upon a parchment-like
expanse;
an artichoke in six varieties of blue; the snipe-legged
hieroglyphic in three parts;
the silver fence protecting Adam's grave or Michael
taking Adam by the wrist.
T H E ART OF T H E P O E T I C L I N E 65
Too stern an intellectual emphasis upon this quality

or that, detracts from one's enjoyment;
it must not wish to disarm anything; nor may the
approved triumph easily be honoured-
that which is great because something else is small.
Moore herself never explained why she turned from

syllabic verse to this end-stopped free verse, but her
poems themselves provide some clues. Consider the
first line of "When I Buy Pictures;' which continues
from the title and begins with the word "or": "or what
is closer to the truth, I when I look at that which I may
regard myself as the imaginary possessor:' This poem
is highly ambivalent about the act of ownership, and I
suspect that in this particular case the poem's syllabic
design seemed to enact a kind of aesthetic possession
that the poem itself has taken pains to reject. Moore
disapproves of anything "which is great because some
thing else is small;' and the syllabic organization was
itself in danger of seeming like a feat. In contrast, these
end-stopped lines have the advantage of organizing
Moore's long catalogue of beloved objects more plainly,
less aggressively. As a result, our attention is thrown
where the poem's argument suggests that Moore would
want it thrown: away from the maker to the things that
are made. The formal mechanism of the poem feels
more organically related to the material, less brilliantly

calculated.
\But are highly discursive free-verse lines really any
less of a feat than syllabic lines? Are the lines from
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley any more or less sophisti
cated than the lines from Canto VII? Can any g�od poem
avoid the impression that its maker has organized .its
lan$uage in intricate ways, even if the maker's goal has
been to disguise the imposition of pattern, making it
seem natural? Every poet is caught in this dilemma,
gj
and gratefully s Like the seventeenth-century poet
,1
George Herbert, who wrote fancy poems about want
ing to speak plainly, Moore made poems that enact this
paradox in their formal decisions. It's hard to know
which version of "When I Buy Pictures" one should
prefer. Moore herself went on to write great poems in
free verse, and she also went onto write great poems in
syllabics. She may have felt that the plain coincidence
of syntax and line improved "When I Buy Pictures;' but
she was unwilling to make categorical aesthetic deci
sions, as if to say that one kind of line was inevitably
superior to another kind of line. Her end-stopped line
had one effect, and her annotating line had another.
Today, this freedom to choose from among a wide
range of formal possibilities rather than between them
is crucial. Even a century ago, when Pound and Eliot
decided that the dilution of free verse had already gone

too far, they would have witnessed the maturity of sev
eral distinct species of line: Pound's end-stopped line,
Moore's end-stopped line, Williams's annotating line,
and the parsing line of Williams's earlier poems. In
addition, Eliot had developed a distinctive free-verse
line from the post-Shakespearean blank verse of John
Webster, a line that invokes a regular meter in order
to avoid it. With such a sophisticated and varied free
verse vocabulary in place, what were Pound and Eliot
complaining about when they returned to the writing
of rhymed quatrains?
In part, their countercurrent was designed to re
mind writers of free verse that the embrace of innova
tion did not inevitably entail a rejection of the pleasures
of metrical writing. In addition, they were pointing
out the danger of relying too exclusively or program
matically on any one kind line ending. The only poem
I've examined that might have raised their hackles is
Williams's early "Pastoral"-not because it uses a pars
ing line, but because it parses its syntax so consistently
that the poem cannot generate the energy required to
make its subject matter seem worthy of its own notice.
Wallace Stevens and H. D. (as well as a host of lesser
poets) also used a parsing line more often than not, and
in itself the line is not to be scorned: by serving up a
· 68 J A M E S LONG EN BACH
poem's syntax in clearly apprehendable units, the parts

ing line may allow us to inhabit a syntactically complex
argument more viscerally.
But whatever its strengths, no particular kind of line
needs to be championed at the expense of other kinds.
While I have for strategic purposes examine� poems
that highlight different kinds of lines egregiously (end
stopped, parsing, annotating), my point is that poems
nee.d not confine themselves to any one of these proce
dures. Finally, no particular line is valuable except inas
much as it performs a dramatic function in relationship
to other lines in a particular poem: one kind of lirie
ending becomes powerful because of its relationship to
other kinds of line endings.
We have seen this to be the case in Shakespeare: the
speech from King Lear moves (we can now say) from
end-stopped lines through parsing and annotating
lines, gradually increasing the tension between syntax
and line as it moves forward. We've seen that the same
kind of movement distinguishes Gli.ick's "Nostos:'
Substitution
of the immutable
For relentless earth. What

Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.
Gliick's poem ends with a line of concluding wisdom

that in itself might resemble the concluding gesture of
Williams's "Pastoral": the crucial difference is that her
poem moves from line endings that parse the syntax-
l
1
Substitution
of the immutable
.1
1
-to line endings that annotate the syntax-
What
do I know
-before settling back into the end-stopped line with

which the poem also began.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The poem is not written out of a categorical decision

to use one kind of line rather than another, and, as a
result, the poem's concluding wisdom does not f�el

layered over the poem's content. Instead, it feels like
a statement that the reader of the poem has, like the
author, worked to achieve. This work is the pleasure
of poetry, and the end of the line is where the work of
pleasure takes place.
As "Nostos" demonstrates, the purpose-the thrill
of � free verse prosody lies in the ability to shape the
movement of a poem through the strategic use of dif
ferent kinds of line endings. The line's control of in�
tonation creates the expectation for meaningfulness,
allowing a poem's language to wander from its more
workaday organizational tasks. And when the different
kinds of line endings I've examined are used in consort
with one another, then all line endings become a means
of annotating syntax. That is, in the context of lines that
cut up the syntax in provocative ways, a simple pars
ing line that does nothing to syntax may be the most
attention-grabbing line of all-just as an annotating
line is more obviously provocative in the context of a
lot of end-stopped lines. The drama of lineation lies in
the simultaneous making and breaking of our expecta
tion for pattern.
Consider the practice of Frank Bidart. Typed out as
prose, Bidart's syntax is often difficult to follow, but set
in lines, it becomes a pattern of sound that organizes
T H E A R T OF T H E P O ET I C L I N E 71
our experience of the poem before we have time to

worry about the subject matter. Near the end of Bidart's
long poem "Confessional;' for instance, comes a fifty
seven-line sentence based on a famous prose sentence
from the ninth chapter of St. Augustine's Confessions.
The sentence is complex _enough in the original Latin-a
periodic sentence that interposes six dependent clauses
before introducing the main subject and verb. Repli
cating this structure, Bidart fleshes out the dependent
clauses, making them longer and more syntactically
complex than in the original version. The six dependent
clauses, each beginning with the word "!£:' range from
two to seventeen lines, but the independent clause (the
main subject and verb) appears on a single line. If "this"
that we hear is the voice of God, proclaim the first fifty
six lines of the sentence in so many more words, then
would not this be: ENTER THOU INTO THE JOY OF

THY LORD?
This final line appears as a tremendous relief, but it

also makes us crave the tension built up in the preced
ing fifty-six lines of the sentence. For while that tension
is proliferated by the succession of dependent clauses,
it is at the same time tightly controlled by Bidart's stra
tegic lineation of the syntax within those clauses. In
addifion-;-ltke-Emily Dickinson before him, Bidart em-

. . , ploys idiosyncratic punctuation and capitalization in
order to .control further our experience of the poem's
syntax. As a result, we feel that the wisdom of the sen
tence lies not precisely in what it says but in the end
lessly reticulated process of arriving at what it says.
That process consists of an intricate dance of pat
tern. and variation, the lineation of each clause both
building on and departing from the clause preceding it. ·
The first dependent clause is also the briefest: two lines

parse the clause.
If any man could shut his ears
to the tumult of the flesh-;
The second dependent clause is eleven lines long, and

it begins by parsing the syntax in the same way, end
ing the first line before the beginning of a prepositional
phrase ("to the tumult"; "of earth and sea").
if suddenly the cacophony
of earth and sea and air
were SILENT, and the voice of the self

died to the self, and so the self
found its way beyond the self,-

I .
beyond the SELF it has made,-
SILENT
otir expiations and confessions,
the voice that says: NO REMISSION OF SINS
WITHOUT THE SHEDDING OF BLO OD�
the WORD that was only given us drenched in blood,-
After the initial parsing lines, these lines begin annotat

i ing the syntax more boldly, breaking apart subjects and
l,]
verbs ("the self I died"; "the self I I found") and increas
ing the tension by reinforcing the second annotating
line with a stanza division. Then, after the syntax is in
terrupted by an apposition set as its own line ("beyond
the SELF it has made"), we meet the most aggressively
ll
annotating line in the clause, its single word thrown
into uppercase for additional emphasis: "SILENT I our
expiations and confessions:' Finally, the clause settles
back down into parsing and end-stopped lines, prepar
ing us for what we might on first reading expect to be
the subject of the independent clause.
Instead, we begin a third dependent clause, and each
of the subsequent clauses offers a similar sequence of line
endings, providing a pattern for the mounting tension
74 J A M ES LON G E N BACH
caused by the continued delay of the subject: parsing

lines are followed by annotating lines that finally give
way to end-stopped lines. This pattern allows us to ex
perience the mounting tension not as disorder but as
a reliable sequence of waves: while each dependent
clause contributes to the overall tension of the periodic
sentence, the lineation within each dependent clause
stra�egically curbs and increases that tension in smaller
increments. Interweaving three different kinds of line ·
ending in what becomes a familiar pattern, Bidart or
chestrates intonation, speed, and our expectation for
syntactical repetition.
Listen to the way in which the last two dependent
clauses spill into the concluding one-line independent
clause. The first of these dependent clauses is seventeen
lines long while the second is just five lines long.
. . . if in this SILENCE,
He whom we crave to hear
SPOKE AT LAST-;
spoke not through the VEIL

of earth and sea and air,
thunder, 'SIGNS AND WONDERS; the voice

of an angel, the enigma of similitude and of
THE ART O F THE POETIC L I N E 75
parable, all
I ·
the ALIEN that BESETS us here,-
. . . �poke not by them, but by HIMSELF,
calling us to return into that secret place from

which He
comes forth at last to us,-
. . . just as we two
together reached forth and for one
heartbeat attained to TOUCH
the WISDOM that is our SO URCE and GROUND, -
. . . if this could continue, and LIFE

were that one moment of
wisdom and understanding
i for which we then sighed,-

�J

THY LORD?
The first of these dependent clauses continues the ex

pected pattern, moving from parsing through annotating
to end-stopped lines. But while the annotating lines have ·
broken the syntax more aggressively than ever ("and

of // parable, all I I the ALIEN"), the effect of these line
endings does not feel arbitrary: to make each dependent
clause rise to a higher level of tension than the one pre
ceding it, Bidart's lineation needs to become increas
_
ingly aggressive before it calms down again, preparing .
us for the beginning of the next dependent claus.e.
But the final dependent clause disrupts the pattern:
' !
It begins not with parsing lines but with line endings _/
.
that immediately annotate the syntax: "and LIFE I were
that one moment of I wisdom:' At this point in our ex
perience of the sentence, the disruption of the pattern
now feels as exciting as the establishment of the pattern
felt at the beginning of the sentence. By foreshortening
the pattern, moving immediately into annotating lines,
Bidart launches us into the final line of the sentence:
the much-delayed independent clause, the payoff for
our negotiation of this syntactical thicket.

THYLORD?
Usually, the strategic delay of the subject in a periodic

sentence makes its arrival feel momentous. But reduced
to its simplest form, Bidart's sentence says something
oddly tautological: "if we could hear the voice of God,
would it not say 'enter thou into the joy of thy Lord?"'
That's close to saying that if we could enter into the
joy of the Lord, then we could enter into the joy of the
Lord. And in itself, the insight is merely as interest
ing as .the final line of Williams's "Pastoral" or Gliick's
"Nostos:' The whole sentence embodies a deeper wis
dom: more devastating than whatever the voice of God
might say is the process we must negotiate in order
to hear what it says. Bidart's sentence is about sound,
but more profoundly, the sentence is itself the sound
of language organized in lines so that we might expe
rience the sound as pleasure.
T. S. Eliot once said that poetry is a form of punc
tuation, and few poets embody that observation on the
page more strenuously than Bidart, who pushes punc
tuation, typography, and lineation to strategically ex
pressive ends, forcing us to hear the movement of his
syntax in one way rather than in another way. But if his
use of punctuation and typography can seem idiosyn
cratic, his deployment of line is paradigmatic. Each line
of "Confessional" forces us to recognize the implications
of formal decisions that every poet makes with every
line he commits to paper-no matter what kind of line
or combination of lines the poet employs. To hear the
work of line in a great contemporary poem is to listen
again to the whole history of poetry in English.
Listen to one final poem-a poem that like Pound's
78 J A M ES L O N G E N B A C H
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is organized in rhymed qua- ,

trains but that unlike Mauberley is not lineated on the
page as rhymed quatrains.
Experience is the Angled

Road
Preferred against the
Mind
By-Paradox-The
Mind itself
Presuming it to lead
Quite opposite-How
Complicate
The Discipline of
Man-
Compelling Him to
Choose Himself
His Pre appointed Pain-
This is a transcription of the way Emily Dickinson

lineated her poem on the page: while it does not cap
ture the precise spacing of her words or the particular
length and direction of her dashes, it does preserve her
line endings, and the resulting lines do not correspond
precisely to the poem's metrical pattern. In contrast, all
available editions of her work print this poem in regu-
THE ART OF THE POETIC L I N E 79
lar stanzas: rhymed quatrains of alternating tetrameter

and trimeter lines.
Some readers will always maintain that Dickinson's
line endings are simply produced by the collision of hand
writing and margin, just as earlier readers maintained
that her punctuation would have been corrected had she
published her poems in conventional ways. Dickinson's
practice varies too much to allow us to rest too comfort
ably on its conclusion, .however: when setting down other
poems, she altered the size of her handwriting to make
the line fit the page. Early editors regularized Dickinson's
idiosyncratic punctuation and irregular rhythms, and re
cent editions have restored many of these crucial aspects
of Dickinson's rhythmic fingerprint while regularizing
�· her lineation.
Experience is the Angled Road

Preferred against the Mind
l
By-Paradox-the Mind itself
Presuming it to lead
j
l
This lineation makes complete sense, since it rein
forces our ability to hear the poem's alternating tetra
J
.
meter and trimeter lines. But for ears educated by the
line endings employed by Milton, Williams, or Bidart,
Dickinson's original line endings also function aurally:
the poet who employs punctuation with no grammatical
80 J A M ES LO N G E N BACH
function in order to create pauses and stresses that run

against meter-
By-Paradox-the Mind itself
-also harnesses the tension between syntax, meter, and

line to control the rhythmic life of her poems.
By-Paradox-The
Mind itself
As is the case with Moore's multiple versions of "When I

Buy Pictures;' one doesn't know exactly how to choose.
The dilemma is part of Dickinson's power, and it won't
ever be solved because Dickinson's power is bound
up with the endlessly equivocal nature of line. What
matters most is the dilemma itself, not any particular
solution. The different lineations alter the pattern of
stress created by the play between meter, rhyme, syn
tax, and line.
All four of these elements are in tension in Dickin
son's poem, as they are in the rhymed quatrains of
Pound's Mauberley. Three of them are in tension in
Moore's poems, two of them in Williams's. How much
can a great poem afford to give up? From the start, I've
argued that the fluctuating tension between syntax
and line is crucial to poetry at large, discovering it in
Shakespeare and Milton as well as Gluck and Bidart.

But there are poems that give up this tension almost
completely: the prose poem strategically relinquishes
the power of Hi:1e in the same way that a blank-verse
poem relinquishes the power of rhyme or a free-verse
poem relinquishes the power of meter. We've seen that
the play of meter and rhyme is often present in poems
that are not regularly metered and rhymed, however,
and line similarly continues to be crucial to poems that
are not written in lines. This paradox is the springboard
for the following chapter.
�
�
j
i
J
j
j
�
j
l
1
1
.I
l
J
j
l
l
l
..J
L J
Poem and Prose
Whatever else he is, James Joyce is one of the great mak

ers of lines in the English language.
Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing.

Imperthnthn thnthnthn.
Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.
Horrid! And gold flushed more.
A husky fifenote blew.
Blew. Blue bloom is on the.
Goldpinnacled hair.
A jumping rose on satiny breast of satin, rose of Castile.
Trilling, trilling: Idolores.
Peep! Who's in the . . . . peepofgold?
Tink cried to bronze in pity.
And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.
Decoy. Soft word. But look: the bright stars fade. Notes
chirruping answer.
0 rose! Castile. The moon is breaking.
Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.
Coin rang. Clock clacked.
Avowal. Sonnez. I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave
thee. Smack. La cloche! Thigh smack. Avowal.
Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye! Jingle. Bloo.
83
Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War!

War! The tympanum.
A sail! A veil awave upon the waves.
Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now.
These are the opening twenty-one lines of the "Sirens"

episode of Joyce's novel Ulysses: the episode continues
in this fashion for another thirty-nine end-stppped
lines until Joyce forsakes lineation for a kind of writing
that looks like prose. Like Pound's end-stopped lines,
these lines focus our attention on a variety of rhythmic
and sonic patterns within the compass of the line. But
unlike Pound's, the lines do not necessarily confirm
syntactical closure. And unlike Moore's end-stopped
lines, the lines do not organize our apprehension ofa dis
cursive argument. And unlike Whitman's end-stopped
lines, the lines do not reinforce our awareness of re
peated syntactical patterns. Instead, while Joyce's lines
often end in a way that implies enjambment, the syn
tax does not continue in such a way that would make
us experience the tension of enjambment: "Blew. Blue
bloom is on the:' Occasionally the lines end with" an
even more willful arbitrariness, as if to suggest that
the syllables (even the surname of Joyce's protagonist,
Leopold Bloom) exist as pure sound to be manipulated
as such: "Jingle. Bloo:'
T H E ART OF T H E POETIC L I N E 85
The "Sirens" episode is about the seduction of sound.

Leopold Bloom is nervously killing time in the bar of
the Ormond Hotel at the precise moment when he
suspects that his wife has arranged a sexual tryst. But
when he catches a glimpse of the man he presumes to
be Molly's lover, Bloom doesn't intervene; instead, he
stays behind and listens to a group of drunken men
sing songs. In what way is Bloom, Joyce's modern-day
Odysseus, seduced by the music of the Sirens? In what
way is the reader seduced by Joyce's effort to transform
prose into medium that we read not in order to collect
information but instead to savor its sonic pleasure?
The opening sixty lines of the "Sirens" episode are
a condensation of the prose narrative that follows it: as
we continue reading, we discover a context of narra
tive logic in which every line we've read, no matter how
fragmentary, makes complete sense. For instance, the
first line of the episode ("Bronze by gold heard the hoof
irons, steelyringing") is culled from the first sentence of
the subsequent prose narrative, which describes two
barmaids, one brunette, one blonde, listening to the vice
regal cavalcade roll past the Ormond Hotel.
Bronze by gold, miss Douce's head by miss Kennedy's

head, over the crossblind of the Ormond bar heard the
viceregal hoofs go by, ringing steel.
A page later, even the pure sound of the second line

("Imperthnthn thnthnthn") is revealed to be one char
acter's mockery of another character's pronunciation of
the phrase "impertinent insolence:' In every case, what
appears initially to be a fragment of sound is shown
subsequently to be derived from complete and logical
sentences. For Joyce, line is a way of making familiar
language strange again.
But Joyce is not merely indulging in verbal high jinks.
Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War!

War! The tympanum.
i
I .
J
A sail! A veil awave upon the waves.
Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now.
�
These lines offer snatches from songs that are sung in 1
l
the Ormond Bar, the most important of which is ''All is i
J
lost" or "Tutto e sciolto;' from Bellini's La Sonnambula. 1
In the opera, the heroine innocently sleepwalks her way
into a situation that appears to be a sexual assignation;
her fiance believes that all is lost. In the "Siregs" epi-
. sode, Leopold Bloom also believes that all is lost, that
his wife is unfaithful. But Joyce suggests that Bloom
ought to pay attention to the meaning of the words he
hears: rather than listening to the aria ''All is lost" as
pure sound, ripped from the context of the opera's nar-
rative, he should entertain the possibility that he too is

mistaken about his wife.
Similarly, Joyce suggests that readers of Ulysses ought
not to forget narrative context even when language
is mad� to seem like nothing but sound. Of course
the seduction of sound is paramount; poetry cannot
exist without it. But we ignore the seduction of plain
sense, Joyce suggests, at our own peril. The pleasure of
Ulysses is that Joyce takes neither of these seductions
for granted, forcing us to become aware of the kind of
work we do when making sense of any linguistic ut
terance. Words mean something because they always
th'.reaten to sound like something else.
We are used to thinking of prose poetry as writing
that sacrifices lineation in order to partake more read
ily of certain aspects of prose: our attention shifts from
line to sentence, and syntax must hold our attention
without the additional direction of line (or meter or
rhyme). In contrast, the opening passage of "Sirens" is
prose that has sacrificed syntactical and narrative clo
sure in order to partake more readily of certain aspects
of poetry: our attention shifts from sentence to line,
and sonic patterns must hold our attention without
the additional direction of sentences that satisfy our
hunger for predication. In either case, there is no firm
division to be made between the varieties of lineated
l
)
88 JAMES LO N G E N BACH
poetry and the varieties of what we refer to more

murkily as prose poetry. The effect of Joyce's "Sirens"
depends on the introduction of lineation into the fo��
mal decorum of prose. The effect of our more typical
notion of a prose poem depends on the deletion of lin
eation from the formal decorum of poetry, and the ab
sence of the line would not be interesting if we did not
feel the possibility of its presence.
Listen to the conclusion of John Ashbery's prose
poem "Retro:'
The midnight forest drags you along, thousands of

peach hectares. Told him I wo uldn't do it if I was him.
Nothing to halt the chatter of locusts until they're put
away for the night. He edges closer to your locker.
Why did I leave it open? I've forgotten the combina
tion. But it seems he's not interested in the locker,
maybe my shoe-something unlike anything he's ever
known. Sensing the tension he broke the ice with
a quip about the weather somewhere, or maybe
maybe an observation on time, how it moves vastly
in different channels, always keeping up with itself,
until the day-I'm going to drive back to the office,
a fellowship of miles, collect some of last year's am
munition. Then I'm definitely going to the country, he
laughs.
Nine sentences, the first of which establishes a scene

and a mode of address ("The midnight forest drags you
along"), the second of which seems unrelated to the
scene and disrupts the mode, turning from the second
person .to a first-person account of a third person ("Told
him l woul�n't do it if I was him''). The next sentence re
turns to the outdoor scene ("chatter of locusts"), but the
following sentences establish a new scene, the interior
of a school building. And while these sentences don't
turn away from the new scene, they mix up the modes
of address: "He edges closer to your locker. Why did I
leave it open? I've forgotten the combination:' Here,
the "you" addressed at the beginning of the passage
has merged with the "I" who first addressed the "you:'
Then, when the eighth and longest sentence returns
to the first person after beginning in the third person,
the 'T' doesn't seem to be the same "I" who spoke ear
lier: instead, the "he" who edged toward the locker now
seems to be speaking: ''I'm going to drive back to the
office, a fellowship of miles, collect some of last year's
ammunition. Then I'm definitely going to the country,
he laughs:'
This passage looks like prose, but it invokes the nar
rative logic we associate with prose while at the same
time dismantling it. There's a whisper of continuity to
these phrases ("drive back to the office"-"collect some
90 J A M E S L O N G E N B AC H
of last year's ammunition"-"going to the country"),

since one might imagine a reason for collecting the "'
ammunition at the office before heading to the coun
try. But the narrative links are suppressed, and the real
pleasure of the passage lies· in the way it leaps from one, ,
register of diction to another: the office, the ammuni-_
tion, the country. Rather than fulfilling the expectations ,
arous�d by narrative logic, the passage foregrounds the
disjunctive movement we associate more readily with
poetry and in particular with lineated poetry.
Think of the way Joyce's end-stopped lines follow
on each other in "Sirens:' Or think of the way the final
line of James Wright's "Lying in a Hammock at William
Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" leaps from the
lines preceding it.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
Here, the movement from descriptive lines to the final

moralizing line feels ironic; we suspect that Wright
doesn't really mean that he's wasted his life, or we feel
a need to reconsider the virtue of wasting one's life al.:.
together. In contrast, the end of Ashbery's "Retro" feels
even more challengingly ambiguous, less clearly ironic,
because of the many different and contradictory leaps
that have taken place both between and within the

sentences. The freedom extolled in the poem's final
sentence ("Then I'm definitely going to the country, he
laughs") is embodied
i
in the poem's disruption of the
continuity of scene, diction, and address.
What's more, the formal configuration of "Retro"
seems to embody this flight from constraint: for while
the poem concludes with the prose passage I've quoted
so far, the first half of the poem is organized in lines.
Here, Ashbery controls pacing and intonation through
the kind of interJ? lay of different line endings that we've
observed in poets from Shakespeare to Bidart-an inter
play that becomes even more crucial in poetry that
privileges sonic over semantic coherence.
It's really quite a thrill

when the moon rises above the hill
and you've gotten over someone
salty and mercurial, the only pers ?n you ever loved.
Walks in the park are enjoyed.
The first two lines, marked by rhyme, parse the syntax

("a thrill I when"; "the hill I and"). Then the third line
annotates it ("someone I salty"), pushing us into the
fourth line while the final syllable of the word "mercu
rial" pulls us back by recalling the opening rhyme. The
fourth line itself is end-stopped, and, after the stanza

division, the fifth line is not only end-stopped but syn
tactically complete. Reading the passage, regardless of
what it says, we experience the sound of an argume�t
accumulating sense, a steady increase in the tension
between syntax and line giving way to the stasis of con
firmation: "Walks in the park are enjoyed:' Listen to the
rest of the lineated portion of the poem.
Going to Jerusalem now

I walked into a hotel room.
I didn't need a name or anything.
I went to Bellevue Hospital,
got a piece of the guy.
As I say, it's really quite a thrill.
Quite a thrill too to bend objects

that always return to their appointed grooves
will it be always thus? Or will auto parts
get to have their day in the sun?
Got to drone now.

Princess Ida plans to overwork us four days a week
until the bracts have mauved up.
Then it's a tailgate party-
how would you like your burger done?
A little tea with that?
I saw her wailing for some animals.

That doesn't mean a thing doesn't happen
Or ohly goes away, or gets worse.
What's the worst that could happen?
The plain sense of these lines is more readily available

than the sense of the prose passage that follows them:
"Retro" is about the feeling of having been released from
the fetters of prior experience. If we must work hard for
four days, we can nonetheless look forward to the tail
gate party. If we've lost the only person we've ever loved,
we can nonetheless enjoy casual sex. We don't even
need a name. If the work of bending objects "to their
appointed grooves" once seemed thrilling, we can none
theless look forward to the moment when objects might
seem gloriously lacking in their previously appointed
purpose. This wisdom applies both to auto parts, which
might be yanked from the whole machine to glisten in
the sun, and to sentences, which might be allowed to
wander from the lines of a poem. "What's the worst that
could happen?" asks the last line that appears in "Retro;'
and the answer is the passage of nine unlineated sen
tences with which the poem concludes. Formally as well
as thematically, this poem heads for the open road.
Or does it? What about the tone of Ashbery's poem?

Is "Retro" merely suggesting that walks in the park and
one-night stands are to be preferred to the memory of the
only person we've ever loved? That automobiles ought to
be dismantled, their parts splayed across the lawn so we
can recognize their true beauty? That we'll be happier if
we give up the fetters of lineation and wallow in prose?
That we'll be happier still if we forsake the narrative logic
we associate with prose? That freedom can automatically
be purchased at the expense of constraint?
It may be thrilling to consider what might happen to
our sentences when we stop thinking about lines, just as
it may be thrilling to consider what might happen to our
lines when we stop thinking about meter and rhyme.
But to say that such relinquishments are "really quite a
thrill;' as the opening line of "Retro" does, is to highlight
the self-satisfaction that may too easily accompany such
relinquishments. The very shape of Ashbery's "Retro" (a "
poem that begins in lines and ends in prose) suggests
that we inevitably think about lineation when we read a
prose poem, just as we think about the whole car when
we admire the beauty of auto parts. Ashbery is not ask
ing us to choose between different ways of organizing .
language in a poem: he wants to liberate us from a too
familiar narrative of what constitutes our liberation. He
wants to liberate us from the tyranny of risk as we have
learned to recognize it.
Some poets have argued that the rejection of line

carries a kind of political charge, just as poets once
felt that the rejection of rhyming verse for blank verse
or blank verse for free verse carried a political charge.
This may be true in a particular time at a particular
place; But it cannot be true categorically. For example,
even if the heroic couplet was once associated with
hierarchical thinking in the eighteenth century, it does
not follow that the heroic couplet will always inevitably
be doomed to reproduce the same hierarchies in our
thought. The relationship between formal choice and
ideological position is constantly shifting, and it isn't
possible to predict the repercussions of formal decisions
except inasmuch as we might see them played out in
the work of individual poets.
In certain circumstances, consequently, the rejection
of line may be liberating or it may be constricting. In
other circumstances, the adoption of line may be liber
ating or constricting. If a poet who works in lines feels
that her syntax isn't very interesting, abandoning lines
may allow her to discover syntactical possibilities that
her usual manner of lineation has occluded. And if a
poet who has abandoned lines finds that her syntax has
grown predictable, then the introduction of lineation
may provide a tension that will reinvigorate the syntax.
Think back to William Carlos Williams. In poems like
the early "Pastoral;' Williams was wedded to the parsing
l
line, a line that in Williams's hands tends to grow flac
cid because it so consistently breaks the syntax into its
predictable parts. But by the time he published Spring
and All, Williams had added the annotating line to
his poetic tool kit, a line that cuts against the already
plain parameters of syntax. His syntax itself became
more varied, his range of diction grew wider, and his
tendet:icy to close his poems with ready-made wisdom
was sharply curtailed.
Many things, including the example of Marianne
Moore's syllabic poems, fueled this transformation, but
in the few years that passed between "Pastoral" and
Spring and All, Williams wrote a collection of prose
poems called Kora in Hell, and in retrospect it's easy to
see why the relinquishment of lineation not only pro
duced dazzling writing in itself but ultimately trans
formed Williams's relationship to the poetic line.
Talk as you will, say: "No woman wants to bother with

children in this country";-speak of your Amsterdam
and the whitest aprons and brightest doorknobs in
Christendom. And I'll answer you: Gleaming door
knobs and scrubbed entries have heard the songs of the
housemaids at sun-up and-housemaids are wishes.
Whose? Ha! the dark canals are whistling, whistling
for who will cross to the other side. If I remain with
hands in pocket leaning upon my lamppost-why-I
·1
bring curses to a hag's lips and her daughter on her

arm knows better than I can tell you-best to blush
and out with it than back beaten after.
Five sentences, the shortest of which consists of one

syllable ("Whose?"), a question that confirms the read
er's growing disorientation, the longest of which crams
together three clauses, first with a conjunction ("and
her daughter") and then with a dash ("-best to blush").
The rhythmic vitality of the final clause is so acute, its
stressed syllables so artfully reinforced by alliteration,
that it begs to be scanned-
BEST to BLUSH and OUT with IT than BACK

BEATen AFTer
-but the connection of this clause to the clauses pre

ceding it feels both grammatically and semantically
tenuous. Like Ashbery's, Williams's prose poem privi
leges sonic over semantic coherence, flirting with nar
rative logic only to make us feel its fragility.
But while Ashbery begs the question of prose poet
ry's relati�nship to poetry by moving from lineated to
unlineated sentences, Williams asks us to consider prose
poetry's relationship to prose: he follows his prose poem
with a prose commentary, and the commentary empha
sizes narrative links that the prose poem suppresses.
In Holland a t daybreak, of a fine spring morning, one
sees the housemaids beating rugs before the small

houses of such a city as Amsterdam, sweeping, scrub
bing the low entry steps and polishing doorbells and
doorknobs. By night perhaps there will be an old woman
with a girl on her arm, histing and whistling across a

deserted canal to some late loiterer trudging aimlessly
on beneath the gas lamps.
These sentences present Williams's point more plainly:

the civic decorum of the Dutch city disguises its more
lascivious nightlife. But if this thematic perspicuity
adds something to our experience of the prose poem,
it also takes something away. For while the prose com
mentary proposes a neat opposition between daylight
cleanliness and nighttime lasciviousness, the prose
poem allows us to entertain the notion that doorknob
scrubbing housemaids are themselves an expression of "
the wish for darkness: the more disorderly verbal deco
rum adds complexity to Williams's point.
In addition, the suppression of narrative logic in the
prose poem encourages Williams to listen to his lan
guage, liberating him to take pleasure in counterintuitive
leaps (doorknobs that hear songs, canals that are whis
tling) and allowing him to produce sentences with greater
rhythmic interest: "Gleaming doorknobs and scrubbed
entries have heard the songs of the housemaids at sun-
u.
T H E A R T O F T H E P O ETI C L I N E 99
up:' To think about lineating the commentary is to think

about parceling out its sense-
In Holland at daybreak,
of a fine spring morning,
on e sees the housemaids beating rugs
before the small houses
-but to think about lineating the prose poem is to stop

thinking so much about sense and to start listening to
patterns of rhythmic stress and sonic echo within the
syntax.
Best to blush and

out with it than back
beaten after.
This is what Williams did when he followed the prose

poems of Kora in Hell with the lineated poems of Spring
and All: writing prose revitalized the syntax of the
poems, and the new syntax demanded that Williams ex
plore a wider variety of line endings, moving away from
his more predictable dependence on the parsing line.
"There is no such thing as prose;' said Stephane
Mallarme. "There is the alphabet, and then there are
verses which are more or less closely knit, more or
less diffuse. So long as there is a straining toward style,
there is versification:' This statement is riot merely pro

vocative. Williams needed to write logical prose so that
he might hear what disjunctive prose could sound like,
just as he needed to write unlineated sentences in order
to hear what lines could sound like. He placed the two
kinds of prose side by side in Kora in Hell so that we
might feel the necessity of his excursion from lineated
poet�y, just as Ashbery wedged prose poetry against
lineated poetry in "Retro" so that we might hear how
one formal gesture invokes, depends on, complicates
the other. Truly to strain toward style, to write in one
way rather than another way, is not to take a stand on
prose or line or meter or rhyme: it is to discover what
the language of a particular poem requires.
What do these sentences require? How might they
strain toward style?
How should the world gain if this house failed, even

though a hundred little houses were the better for it,
for here power [has] gone forth or lingered, giving en
ergy, precision; it gave to a far people beneficent rule,
and still under its roof living intellect is sweetened by
old memories of its descent from far off ? How should
the world be better if the wren's nest flourish and the
eagle's house is scattered?
William Butler Yeats wrote these sentences in his jour

nal on the morning of August 7, 19 0 9 . As the passage
I T H E A R T O F T H E P O ET I C L I N E 101
suggests, Yeats had a lot of ideas for poems. He was

passionately concerned about a number of social issues,
but he hadn't written much poetry in years. He worried
that his ideas were themselves the problem. Later · the
same day, however, Yeats wrote down this line-
How should the world be better if this house
-a pentameter line derived from the opening phrase

of the prose passage: "How should the world gain if
this house failed:' That phrase could also be a pentame
ter, though a slightly clunkier one. By substituting the
phrase "be better" for "gain;' Yeats smoothed out the
iambs and pushed the main verb to the next line, creat
ing an enjambment that moves the poem forward. He
retained the line's opening trochee ("HOW should"),
taking advantage of the misplaced accent's call to atten
tion. Then, reconsidering the word "better;' he changed
it to "luckier;' roughening up his pentameter in a differ
ent way by adding an extra unstressed syllable.
How should the world be luckier if this house
Finally, Yeats continued his new sentence through six ad

ditional pentameter lines, delaying the verb we expect at
the beginning of the second line until the middle of the
third line. When he got to the third line, he jettisoned
his original verb ("failed") in favor of the more tactile
l
I
102 J A M ES LO N G E N B A C H I
I
I
i
"became too ruinous;' which also had the advantage of
rhyming in an attractively off-key way with "house:'
How should the world be luckier if this house

Where passion and.precision have been one
Time out of mind became too ruinous
To breed the lidless eye that loves the sun
An.cl the sweet laughing eagle thoughts that grow .
Where wings have memory of wings and all
That comes of the best knit to the best?
These lines are very close to the final version of "Upon a

House Shaken by the Land Agitation"; only the punctua
tion would be changed. The second and fourth lines are
fairly regular pentameters, but like the first line, the third
begins with an inverted foot ("T IME out of MIND"), and
the fifth begins with an extra unaccented syllable (''And
the SWEET "). The cumulative effect is that his syntax
creates a rhythmic pattern but at the same time deviates
from it enough to make the syntax feel under tension,
determined to move through the pattern.
At the same time, a rhyme scheme has taken shape:
A B A B C D-then what? The seventh line could have
ended where the syntax ends, giving these seven lines
a satisfying moment of closure; but as it stands, the
seventh line contains only four stresses, not the re
quired five.
.I
. I
\ 'I1
f
t
T H E ART O F T H E POETIC L I N E 1 03
That COMES of the BEST KNIT to the BEST?
Yeats needed another iamb rhyming with "grow;' and he

could have written something like "That comes of the
best knit to the best we've known:' Instead, he added
the word "although" ("That comes of the best knit to the
best? Although") and moved immediately into the un
broken syntactical swoop of the poem's concluding five
lines.
Although
Mean roof-trees were the sturdier for its fall,
How should their luck run high enough to reach
The gifts that govern men, and after these
To gradual Time's last gift, a written speech
Wrought of high laugher, loveliness and ease?
The spell was broken. By turning to prose, then cast

ing his prose into lines, Yeats was writing some of his
greatest poetry after several years of having written al
most none.
While he often wrote highly figurative and rhyth
mic prose, following the examples of Walter Pater and
Mallarme, Yeats was never inclined to write prose po
etry. But whenever he wrote out a prose version of what
he imagined a poem might be, the poem became itself
not because of the logical sense of the prose but because
1 04 J A M ES LO N G E N B A C H
a snatch of language in the prose ignited, leading soni�

cally to other words, creating patterns of sound while si
multaneously disrupting them. Writing "Upon a House
Shaken by the Land Agitation;' Yeats first worried about
having a discursive argument at all, because he knew that
the argument not only wouldn't make a poem but might
inhibit the making of a poem. Then he wrote down the/
argument anyway. Then he listened to what he had writ
ten, liberated from the known world of conviction into ·
the mysterious, unmade world of sound. Like Williams

and Ashbery, Yeats privileges sonic coherence. ,
Still, we don't have much trouble following the sense
of Yeats's poem, as we might when first encountering
�;r I
I
Williams's prose poem. But we probably don't enter the
1 I
experience of Yeats's poem because we want to know
,. '
, I what it says about the rent reductions imposed on land
owners by the Irish courts-just as we are probably
t I
not motivated to read Williams's prose poem in order
.;.._: l
to glean his thoughts about Dutch morality. We enter
the experience of "Upon a House Shaken by the Land
Agitation" because we are seduced by the tensions be
I
r· · ·
r I
tween the underlying pentameter and the rhythms of
I '
the syntax, between the rhythms of the syntax and the
length of the lines as they are marked by the rhyme
scheme.
Beginning with my discussion of the speech from
Shakespeare's King Lear, I have stressed the impor-
r THE ART OF THE POETIC LINE 105
tance of these tensions: the effect of the line is unpre

dictable except inasmuch as a particular line interacts
with the other elements of a particular poem. But the
only plausible proscription in art is that there can be
no proscriptions. Yeats's prose sentences become more
vital when they are recast in lines. Williams's lineation
becomes more complex by virtue of his abandonment
of lines. Finally, the very nature of line encourages us
to question the power of line. For if it's not possible to
predict the effect of any particular kind of line except
in its relationship to syntax, then we will inevitably
come to consider the effect of suppressing that tension.
Meter and rhyme provoke us similarly.
What remains to be relinquished? If syntax shoul
ders more weight in the absence of line, what happens
to syntax if we jettison punctuation as well? Joyce did
so famously at the end of Ulysses, offering an entire
chapter of unpunctuated prose.
and 0 that awful deepdown torrent 0 and the sea the

sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sun
sets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and
all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and
yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine
and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl
where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put
the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or
shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the

Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as an
other and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again
yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my
mountain flower and first I put my arms around him
yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my
breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like
m�d and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Here, no matter how obscure the connections between

his clauses and phrases, Joyce lures us forward by em
phasizing other qualities we think of when we call prose
poetic: luxuriously concrete diction (drawing atten
tion to individual clauses and phrases rather than the
grammatical links between them) and a steady pulse of
repeated syllables (linking clauses and phrases whose
relationship may be grammatically tenuous). In addi
tion, however complex the syntax within the clauses,
the connections between the clauses are simply paratac
tic. And when syntactical ambiguity does erupt, the am
biguity functions psychologically: weaving this endless
sentence, Molly Bloom conflates her former lovers with
her husband (Bloom asked her to say yes, but another
man kissed her under the Moorish wall). The slippage
, ,
I between the past and the present allows Molly to affirm
her ongoing life in the future: in a sense, she can't live
with punctuation.
I '
}
�!
[f '
In "Idem 4;' Michael Palmer suggests that we all live

without punctuation all the time. This section of his un
punctuated prose poem nods to Molly's "yes;' but rather
than linking the clauses paratactically, as Joyce does,
Palmer gathers them together in one giant independent
clause.
now I say yes to the bridge the dead cross no thicker

than a fingernail no wider than a knife eyes fixed on
the Gates of Paradise yes to the visible hills the ac
tual hills olive trees with grey underleaf commas be
tween each breath brief tremor smell of gunpowder
then screams it was screams and screams all the way
through
Here, the opening clause ("Now I say yes to") governs

everything that follows: the bridge that the dead cross,
the visible hills, the olive trees on the hills, the smell of
gunpowder, the screams. And once again the syntacti
cal ambiguity feels functional, especially since it builds
as the poem progresses: in this run-on vision of heaven,
punctuation exists on the other side of the river, where
there are "commas between each breath:'
Unpunctuated prose is rare, however, and the un
punctuated prose poem is even more uncommon. In
contrast, it's revealing to remember that unpunctu
ated poetry has a long and rich history: lineation may
l
compensate for or take advantage of the· 1ack of punc

tuation in various ways. In prose poetry, the persistence
of punctuation is an acknowledgment of the power of
line. And in unpunctuated poetry, line is an acknowl
edgment of the power of punctuation, which is to say
syntax. Listen to the opening lines of C. D. Wright's
"Various Positions:'
It was getting on toward suppertime
It was his night off
A shoe dropped
It had nothing whatsoever to do with you
It was an efficiency apartment
The breast seeks its own level
The table got down on its knees
With an amaryllis at their sill
They assume late spring donkey
It was stifling
It i s the hair that makes i t s o mysterious
A book of matches goes off in her shirt
With one exception, these one-line stanzas are syntac

tically complete, and their syntax is so simple that we
don't require any punctuation to follow their sense. The
punctuated lines from the beginning of Joyce's "Sirens"
are all end-stopped as well, but they nonetheless give
the impression of enjambment because of the way Joyce
deploys the line to fragment the syntax: "Blue bloom is
on the:' In contrast, Wright's poem feels provocatively
static, arranged in lines that don't seem to function as
lines in relationship to the syntax. Like a prose poem,
a poem written in syntactically closed lines suppresses
the work of the line, focusing our attention on the sen
tence or sentence fragment.
Wright's title obviously refers to the sexual overtones
of her poem's subject matter, but it also alerts us to the
subtly different ways in which she is in fact positioning
her line in relationship to her syntax: as it moves forward,
the poem does not simply substitute line endings for
punctuation but takes strategic advantage of the lack of
punctuation. The first seven lines of "Various Positions"
are end-stopped in a particular way; syntax equals line,
and there is no suggestion of syntactical continuity be
tween one line and the next. But the one syntactically
l
incomplete line is a prepositional phrase ("With an ama

ryllis at their sill"), and the line parses the phrase so that
we assume a syntactical continuity between the eighth
line and the ninth, the plural possessive ("their") prepar
ing us for the subject of the independent clause ("they").
With an amaryllis at their sill
They assume late spring donkey
At first, this break from the poem's stern sequence of

end-stopped lines seems like an exception rather than
a structural shift: the poem returns immediately to its
initial decorum of syntactically complete end-stopped
lines. But toward the end of the poem we encounter two
more parsing lines, both of them prepositional phrases
as well.
He wants nothing more than to sleep
Inside her holster
The chair fell to pieces
On the eve of the eighth day
Her milk came in

T H E A R T OF T H E P O ET I C L I N E 111
These two prepositional phrases ("Inside her holster"

and "On the eve of the eighth day") work differently
than the first one we encountered ("With an amaryllis
at the sill"). Now, we are at greater liberty to read the
syntax .in two different ways, depending on the inde
pendent clause to which we link the preposition. First,
we read the syntax this way.
He wants nothing more than to sleep
Inside her holster
Then, we are also encouraged to link the prepositional

phrase to the following line-
Inside her holster
-except that while this sentence is syntactically co

herent, it is semantically incoherent. Finally, when we
reach the last of the poem's three parsing lines, the ef
fect of the continuing syntax is altered once again, for
now the two ways of reading the relationship of the
lines are syntactically as well as semantically coherent:
we may choose between this reading of the syntax-
-and t�is reading of the syntax.
Her milk came in
This effect is not in itselfuncommon. Emily Dickinson

sometimes fosters the same kind of syntactical ambigu
ity by eschewing conventional punctuation between her
lines. And at moments of great dramatic tension, George
Oppen creates this slippage not only between the lines
but within the lines, momentarily refusing to organize
his syntax with either punctuation or lineation.
help me I am
of that people the grass
blades touch
and touch in their small
distances the poem

begins
This effect is not in itself complex: few formal strate

gies are. But because Oppen begins "If It All Went Up
in Smoke" by parsing syntax with his lines, the erup
tion of run-on syntax feels exciting rather than merely
confusing. Similarly, in "Various Positions;' a poem
that begins by sternly curtailing the work of lineation
while also jettisoning punctuation, Wright's move
ment between three different ways of deploying a
simple parsing line feels revelatory-the embodiment
of the momentous physical transformation that the
final line of the poem describes. We're used to poems
moving from discursive continuity to surprising mo
ments of disjunction; this is the thrill of the concluding
line of James Wright's "Lying in a Hammock at William
Duffy's Farm:' In contrast, C. D. Wright energizes the
opposite movement, making the simplest gesture of
narrative continuity seem astonishing again: "On the
eve of the eighth day I Her milk came in:'
Whatever shape it takes, this kind of movement is
what makes a poem feel like an act of discovery rather
than an act of recitation-an event that happens on
the page rather than a recounting of an event that hap
pened prior to the page. Lineation is a powerful tool
for creating such movement, but not because a poet
chooses simply to write pentameter lines or syntacti
cally complete lines or no lines at all. What matters
within any particular formal decorum is variation: the
l
114 J A M E S LO N G E N B ACH
making of pattern along with the simultaneous disrup

tion of pattern. It's not the pentameter that matters as
such in the speech from King Lear but the way in which
we move within the blank verse from end-stopped
lines to enjambed lines. It's not Ashbery's decision to
write narrative prose that matters in "Retro" but his
slow disruption of the terms of narrative logic. And
it's not Wright's decision to reduce the power of line
but her strategic relaxation of what initially seems like
an unalterable decision. This kind of movement-the
establishment of a formal decorum in which even the
smallest variation from it feels thrilling-is what makes
the act of reading a poem feel like the act of writing a
poem. It is what makes a poem an experience we need
to have more than once, an act of discovery that is con
tingent not simply upon what we learn but on the tem
poral process of discovering how it feels to learn again
what we've always known.
Listen, in conclusion, to one last passage of prose.
To complain of the fascination of what's difficult. It

spoils spontaneity and pleasure and it wastes time.
Repeat the line ending "difficult" three times, and
rhyme on bolt, exult, colt, jolt. One could use the
thought of the wild-winged and unbroken colt [that]
must drag a cart of stones out of pride because it's dif
ficult, and end by denouncing drama, accounts, pub
lic contests-all that's merely difficult.
T H E ART O F T H E POETIC LI N E 115
Yeats wrote these sentences in his journal several

months after completing "Upon a House Shaken by the
Land Agitation:' Once again, he is in search of a poem;
this paragraph is the seedbed for "The Fascination �f
What's Difficult:' But what had earlier been a groping
in the dark has become a little bit like a method. For
even as Yeats puts down this subject for a poem, he
is already thinking more about the sound of the word
"difficult" than about its meaning. He can hear the
poem unfolding before he knows anything about its ar
gument, structure, or form.
After waiting a few more months, Yeats set down
two sentences cast in eight pentameter lines: the phrase
"the fascination of what's difficult" became the opening
pentameter, and the poem went on to rhyme "difficult"
with "colt" and "jolt:'
The fascination of what's difficult

Has dried the sap out of my veins and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There is something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud[,]
Shiver at the lash, and strain and sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road metal.
This is not the whole poem but, once again, this lineated
draft is very close to the final version. The placement of
l
l
116 J A M E S LO N G E N B A C H !
the stressed syllables would be rearranged in the seventh

line, making its conclusion punchier. Although we might
I
scan the resulting pentameter of the final verson of the
poem this way-
SHIVer UNder the LASH, strain, SWEAT and JOLT
-we are more apt to hear the line this way, the stressed
syllables packed together-
SHIVer under the LASH, STRAIN, SWEAT and

JOLT
-as they are in the following line as well.
As though it DRAGGED ROAD METal.
Yeats has solidified the rhythmic life of the poem, but

once again, as was the case with the early draft of "Upon
a House Shaken by the Land Agitation;' this line is too
short: it needs two more stresses to complete the pen
tameter. Once again, a rhyme scheme has taken shape:
A B B A C C A, where the B and C rhymes ("rent" and
"blood") are enticingly close to the original A rhyme
("difficult").
In "Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation;'
Yeats filled out the short line with the word "although;'
I
rhyming strongly with an earlier line, but here he does
something more startling. He ends the line with a word
that sounds nothing like any of the previous rhymes:
"My curse on plays:' As a result, the relationship be
tween the first and second halves of the eighth line of
"The Fascination of What's Difficult" is as deliciously
disjunctive as the relationship between most of the lines
in Wright's "Various Positions:'
As though it dragged road metal
My curse on plays
Where is this poem going? Why would a poem with

such a perspicuous argument so deftly lure us astray?
By suddenly expanding the palate of his rhyme
scheme, shifting our ears to a strategically different
sound, Yeats also discovers a structure for the poem, one
that was familiar to him from thousands of Petrarchan
sonnets, in which the first eight lines (or octet) offer a
proposition on which the second six lines (or sestet)
turn. But since Yeats has placed his volta (or turn) in
the middle of the eighth line rather than at the begin
ning of the ninth line, where it traditionally appears,
his thirteen-line poem has the structure of a sonnet but
not the form of a sonnet. That is, the poem's argument
turns against itself as a sonnet's argument turns, but the
l
.i
j
proportions are just slightly off; the argument does not

inhabit the meter and rhyme scheme in precisely the
traditional fashion.
My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day's war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.
Formally, this is not a true sestet, but it functions like

one, turning sharply against the lines preceding it and
concluding with two lines that have the rhetorical weight
of a couplet but are not rhymed as a couplet: "I swear
before the dawn comes round again I I'll find the stable
and pull out the bolt:' Yeats has simultaneously invoked
a pattern and strayed from it.
If pressed, most anyone would say that "The Fasci
nation of What's Difficult" is about Yeats's frustration
with running the Abbey Theatre, one of the tasks that
had kept him from the lyric poetry he wanted to write.
But Yeats's initial prose version of the poem says al
most nothing about theater business: drama appears
in a list of possible subjects along with accounts and
public contests. Instead, the prose draft sketches out
rhymes that appear both before and after this pseudo
I111l '
1
1
I!
sonnet's volta: difficult; colt, jolt, dolt, bolt. By searching I
for rhymes for the word "difficult;' Yeats produced the
metaphor of the winged colt who must be liberated
from his stall. Then, the strategic disruption of these
rhymes produced the poem's most thrillingly disjunc
tive moment: "My curse on plays:' This phrase sounds
as if it comes out of nowhere, as if the poem is. discov
ering itself at the precise moment we are reading it.
Which is what every great poem does. Whatever
else he is, Yeats is one of the great poets of the English
language-but not because he writes in lines that are me
tered and rhymed. The opening passage of the "Sirens"
chapter of Ulysses cautions us not to idealize the sound
of language: Leopold Bloom is seduced by the sound of
a song whose meaning could help him to make better
sense of his life, and Joyce seduces us with what seems
like the pure sound of words, only to show us that words
have meanings to which we must attend. Approaching
the same point from the opposite direction, Yeats's
poems caution us not to idealize the meaning of lan
I
1,
guage. Both "Upon a House by the Land Agitation" and

"The Fascination of What's Difficult" have clearly para
phrasable arguments, but the arguments in themselves
cannot produce a poem. Yeats's ear produces the poem.
And when we reproduce the poem in our own ears, we
are learning to listen to language that once threatened to
make sense too surely.
120 JAMES LON G EN BACH
1t
I
Poems are poems because we want t o listen t o them.
S ome poems have a prominent argument; some poems
!
don't. But all poems live or die on their capacity to lure
us from their beginnings to their ends by a pattern of
I
I
sounds. �is is why a poem we don't understand may
seem wonderfully satisfying, and this is why a poem
we understand all too well may also seem wonderfully
satisfying. A poem may harness the power of meter, '
rhyme, syntax, and line to establish and disrupt a pat
tern of sounds, and a poem may with equal integrity
reject the power of meter, rhyme, syntax, and line. But
the poet needs to understand what she is rejecting as
well as what she is harnessing. Every poem is based at
least implicitly on a choice to do something rather than
something else, and, as a result, every poem takes power
from its exclusions as well as its inclusions. Poetry is
the sound of language organized in lines, I said at the
beginning of this book. If that statement once seemed
provocative, I hope it now seems like old news. Only a
great poem could make it interesting again.
Further Reading
While line is implicitly a part of any discussion of pros

ody, it is not often accorded explicit or lengthy atten
tion. The three finest exceptions to this observation
may be found in Robert Pinsky's The Sounds ofPoetry: A
Brief Guide, Mary Kinzie's A Poet's Guide to Poetry, and
Charles 0. Hartman's Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody.
Each of these books offers a distinctive discussion of
line, but the arguments are not programmatic. The goal
in each case is to describe a variety of poetic practices.
More specialized discussions of line may be found
in Ellen Bryant Voigt's superb essay on syntax ("Syntax:
Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song") and in Susan
Howe's groundbreaking essay on Emily Dickinson's manu
scripts ("These Flames and Generosities of the Heart:
Emily Dickinson and the Illogic of Sumptuary Values") .
The interview in Frank Bidart's In the Western Night:
Collected Poems, 1965-90 includes brief but very pro
vocative remarks on lineation. So does Allen Grossman's

Summa Lyrica.
Less focused on line as such but still relevant to the
discussion are Hugh Kenner's "Rhyme;' a surprising his
tory of the practice of rhyme in European languages,
Stephen Fredman's Poet's Prose, the subtlest available
121
1 22 J A M E S LO N G E N B A C H
account o f prose poetry, and John Thompson's The

Founding ofEnglish Metre, a book whose title does not do
justice to the wide-ranging implications of its argument.
Interesting accounts of line. may also be found in
T. S. Eliot's "Reflections on Vers Libre, " Donald Justice's
"The Free-Verse Line in Stevens;' Denise Levertov's "On
the Function of the Line;' and Charles Olson's "Projective
Verse:' Eliot's and Olson's essays have been especially
influential; rather than offering a balanced account of
line, they are themselves a part of the history of think
ing about line in American poetry. Many of the essays
collected in The Line in Postmodern Poetry, edited by
Robert Frank and Henry Sayre, are also worth reading.
References
Ashber:y, John. "Retro:' In Where Shall I Wander, pp. 31-32.

New York: HarperCollins, 2005.
Bidart, Frank. "Confessional:' In In the Western Night:
Collected Poems, 1965-90, pp. 53-74. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1990.
-- . ''An Interview-With Mark Halliday:' In In the Western
Night: Collected Poems, 1965-90, pp. 223-41. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.
Blake, William. "The Book of The!:' In Complete Writings,
edited by Geoffrey Keynes, pp. 127-30. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976.
Cunningham, J. V. "How Shall the Poem be Written?" In
Collected Essays, pp. 256-71. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1976.
Dickinson, Emily. "Experience is the Angled Road:' In The
Manuscript Books, edited by R. W. Franklin, 2:1033. 2 vols.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
--. "Experience is the Angled Road:' In The Poems ofEmily
Dickinson: Variorum Edition, edited by R . W. Franklin,
2:839. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1998.
Eliot, T. S. Complete Poems and Plays. New York: Harcourt,
Brace and World, 1971.
-- . "Reflections on Vers Libre." In To Criticize the Critic
and Other Writings, pp. 183-89. London: Faber and Faber,
1965.
123
1 24 J A M E S LON G E N BACH
Frank, Robert, and Henry Sayre, editors. Th e Line i n Post

modern Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Fredman, Stephen. Poet's Prose: Th e Crisis in American
Verse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Frost, Robert. "After Apple Picking:' In Collected Poems,
Prose, and Plays, edited by Richard Poirier and Mark
Richardson, pp. 70-71. New York: Library of America,
1995.
Ginsberg, Allen. "Sunflower Sutra:' In Howl and Other Poems,
pp. 35-38. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1959.
Gluck, Louise. "Nostos:' In Meadowlands, p. 43. Hopewell,
NJ: Ecco, 1996.
Grossman, Allen. Summa Lyrica. In The Sighted Singer: Two
Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers, pp. 205-374.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Hartman, Charles 0. Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996.
Herbert, George. "The Collar:' In The English Poems of George
Herbert, edited by C. A. Patrides, pp. 161-62. London:
J. M. Dent, 1974.
Herrick, Robert. "Upon His Departure Hence:' In The Poems
ofRobert Herrick, edited by L. C. Martin, p. 178. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1965.
Hollander, John. '"Sense Variously Drawn Out': On English
Enjambment:' In Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of
Poetic Form, pp. 91-116. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1975.
Howard, Richard. "November, 1889:' In Inner Voices: Selected
Poems, 1963-2003, pp. 44-56. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2004.
T H E A RT OF T H E P O ET I C L I N E 1 25
Howe, Susan. "These Flames and G enerosities of the Heart:

Emily Dickinson and the Illogic of Sumptuary Values:' In
The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American
Literary History, pp. 131-53. Hanover, NH: University
Pre ss of New England, 1993.
,
Joyce, James. Ulysses: The Corrected Text, edited by Hans
Walter Gabler. New York: Random House, 1986.
Justice, Donald. "The Free-Verse Line in Stevens:' In Oblivion:
On · Writers and Writing, pp. 13-38. Ashland, OR: Story
Line, 1998.
-- . "Nostalgia and Complaint of the Grandparents:' In
New and Selected Poems, pp. 156-57. New York: Knopf,
1995.
Kenner, Hugh. "Rhyme: An Unfinished Monograph:' Common
Knowledge 10 (Fall 2004): 377-425.
Kinzie, Mary. A Poet's Guide to Poetry. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1999.
Levertov, Denise. "On the Function of the Line:' In Light up
the Cave, pp. 61-69. New York: New Directions, 1981.
Mallarme, Stephane. "The Evolution of Literature:' In Selected
Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, translated by Bradford
Cook, pp. 18-24. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1956.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. In Complete Poems and
Major Prose, edited by Merritt Hughes, pp. 209-469.
Indianapolis, IN: Odyssey, 1957.
Moore, Marianne. "The Fish:' In Becoming Marianne Moore:
The Early Poems, 1907-1924, edited by Robin G. Schulze,
pp. 85-86. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2002.
1 26 J A M E S L O N G E N B AC H
-- . "The Past i s the Present:' I n Becoming Marianne

Moore: The Early Poems, 1907-1924, edited by Robin G.
Schulze, p. 74. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2002.
-- . "Wh�n I Buy Pictures:' In Becoming Marianne Moore:
p. 255. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2002.
-- . "When I Buy Pictures:' In Becoming Marianne Moore:
p. 257. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2002.
Olson, Charles. "Projective Verse:' In Selected Writings, edited
by Robert Creeley, pp. 15-26. New York: New Directions,
1951.
Oppen, George. "If It All Went Up in Smoke:' In New Collected
Poems, edited by Michael Davidson, p. 274. New York:
New Directions, 2002.
--. ["Interview with L. S. Dembo:'] Contemporary Litera
ture 10 (Spring 1ef69): 159-77.
-- . "Of Being Numerous:' In New Collected Poems,
edited by Michael Davidson, pp. 163-88. New York: New
Directions, 2002.
Palmer, Michael. "Idem 4:' In First Figure, pp. 33-34. San
Francisco: North Point, 1984.
Pinsky, Robert. The Sounds ofPoetry: A Brief Guide. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
Pound, Ezra. "Canto VII:' In The Cantos, pp. 24-27. New York:
New Directions, 1975.
-- . "Harold Monro:' Criterion 11 (July 1932): 581-92.
T H E ART OF T H E POETIC LIN E 127
-- . "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley:' In Personae: The Shorter

Poems, edited by Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz,
pp. 183-202. New York: New Directions, 1990.
Shakespeare, William. The History ofKing Lear: The Quarto
Tex�. In The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen
Greenblatt et al., pp. 2318-472. New York: Norton, 1997.
-- . The Tragedy ofKing Lear: The Folio Text. In The
Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al.,
pp. 2319-473. New York: Norton, 1997.
Thompson, John. The Founding ofEnglish Metre. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961.
Voigt, Ellen Bryant. "Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm
of Song:' Kenyon Review 25 (Winter 2003): 144-63.
Whitman, Walt. "Song of Myself' In Complete Poetry and
Collected Prose, edited by Justin Kaplan, pp. 188-247.
New York: Library of America, 1982.
Williams, William Carlos. Kora in Hell. In Imaginations,
edited by Webster Schott, pp. 6-82. New York: New
Directions, 1970.
--. "Pastoral:' In The Collected Poems. Vol. 1, 1909-1939,
edited by A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan,
pp. 42-43. New York: New Directions, 1986.
-- . Spring and All. In The Collected Poems. Vol. 1,
1909-1939, edited by Walton Litz and Christopher
MacGowan, pp. 177-236. New York: New Directions,
1986.
--. "To a Poor Old Woman:' In The Collected Poems. Vol. 1,
1909 -1939, edited by A. Walton Litz and Christopher
MacGowan, p. 383. New York: New Directions, 1986.
Wright, C. D. "Various Positions:' In Steal Away: Selected
and New Poems,p. 16i. Port Townsend, WA: Copper

Canyon Press, 2002.
Wright, James. "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's
Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota:' In Above the River: The
Complete Poems, p. 122, New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1990.
Yeats, W. B. "The Fascination of What's Difficult:' In The
Poems, edited by Richard J. Finneran, p. 93. New York:
Macmillan, 1989.
-- . "Journal:' In Memoirs, edited by Denis Donoghue,
pp. 137-278. New York: Macmillan, 1973.
-- . "Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation:' In
The Poems, edited by Richard J. Finneran, pp. 95-96.
New York: Macmillan, 1989.
J A M ES LO N G E N BAC H is the author of three poetry col
lections, including Draft of a Letter, and five works of
criticism, including The Resistance to Poetry, as well
as numerous essays and reviews. He is Joseph Henry
Gilmore Professor of English at the University of
Rochester.
I UNIVERS ITY OF CHICAG O !
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 .1 1 1 1 1 �11'.·
Writing
I
80 726 336 /
THE ART OF sERIR
Series Editor: Charles Baxter
"Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines. " James Langenbach opens this provocative book
with that essential statement. Through a range of examples-from Shakespeare and Milton to Ashbery
and Gliick-Longenbach describes the function of line in metered, rhymed, syllabic, and free-verse
poetry. That function is, sonic, he argues, and our true experience of it can only be identified in relation
to other elements in � poem. Syntax and the interaction of different kinds ofline endings are primary to
understanding line, as is the relationship oflineated poems to prose poetry. TheArt efthePoeticLine is
a vital new resource by one ofAmerica's most important critics and most engaging poets.
Praise for J ames Longenbach :
"A sensibility this cogent, this subtle and austere is rare; even rarer is its proof that µoet1y still flows
through all things and transforms all things in the process. "
-Carol Muske-Dukes. T/1eLorA11geler Time.YBook Re11iew
The Art efthe Poetic Line is part of The Art ef series, a new line of books by important authors on
the craft of writing, edited by Charles Baxter. Each book examines a singular, but often assumed or
�eglected, issue facing the contemporary writer of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. The Art efseries is
meant to restore the art ofcriticismwhile illuminating the art ofwriting.
James Langenbach is the author of three poetry collections, including Drqft ef

a Leaer, and five works of criticism, including The Reristance to Poetry, as
well as numerous essays and reviews. He is Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of
English at the University of Rochester.
Cover and series design: Scott Sorenson I Author Photo © Burton Langenbach

4 258087488214533295 PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

4 258087488214533295 PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Art of

EDITED BY CHARLES BAXTER

The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot by Charles Baxter

The Art ofAttention: A Poet's Eye by Donald Revell

The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again

The Art of, the Poetic Line by James Longenbach

The Art of Time in Fiction by Joan Silber

The Art ofDescription by Mark Doty

The Art ofEndings by Amy Bloom

The Art ofNarrative by Howard Norman

The Resistance to Poetry

Publication of this volume is made possible in part by a grant provided by

Published by Graywolf Press

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007924773

Series cover design: Scott Sorenson

Cover art: Scott Sorenson

the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought

which is given by those lines.

3 Line and Syntax

45 Ending the Line

83 Poem and Prose

121 Further Reading

Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines.

way of organizing the sound of language, and only by

prose poetry but suggesting that the very power of line

Whatever else he is, Shakespeare is one of the great

Beneath is all the fiend's. There's hell, there's darkness,

This is King Lear's madness speaking. While the syn­

Lear. In the other printing, however, these sentences are

Beneath is all the fiend's. There's hell, there's darkness,

We don't know what Shakespeare intended. One com­

the poem's syntax�to the unfolding structure of the

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

None of the lines in the passage I've quoted from King

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

No actor would say the line this way, if only because he

Counting the stresses helps us to recognize a prin­

When I do stare, see how the subject quakes!

Got 'tween the lawful sheets. To't, luxury, pell-mell,

This speech is made of twenty-one lines, most of which

line are not the same thing, there is no regular relation­

When I do stare, see how the subject quakes!

The second line is also syntactically complete, but it is

I pardon that man's life. What was thy cause?

Then the third line, also syntactically complete, is

Adultery? Thou shalt not die. Die for adultery!

Though we move from one to two to three syntactical

unable to distinguish his loyal legitimate son from his /

disloyal bastard son.

Here we have two sentences, the first of which takes

Consider the effect of the first longer sentence if it were

Had Shakespeare broken up the sentence, he would have

Even if we don't follow Lear's sense here, we hear the

Beneath is all the fiend's. There's hell, there's

Here, at the end of the speech, we return to end­

The lines I've examined so far are of course taken

To a Poor Old Woman

They taste good to her

You can see it by

By eschewing most punctuation, this poem puts

They taste good to her

But then Williams makes us think about the way we've

This is King Lear's madness speaking. While the syn

We don't know what Shakespeare intended. One com

Counting the stresses helps us to recognize a prin

line are not the same thing, there is no regular relation

Here, at the end of the speech, we return to end

began to be written in vernacular languages, the addi

into patterns of assonance and alliteration ("cast iri

cally com_pl�.!�..!!!1:� .�g_e�. �oth in S hal<espe,�r�:��ter� ��-;1� ;� s

metered verse, syl�abic�_:��:�.!:��!se-have different

And lines can be even longer than that, as in this pas

j;�bed ��,-;�:v-��a'i H·ii��.··Th�0i�- �gth-"�£"th;"Ii;�"J;;"�

a group of short enjambed lines that in this case em

�.��-�1:_!_elationship t,o oJh�x1L11�J�n9:_i[lg�.