A Word on Wednesday: Enjambment

Poetic liberties allow a scribe license to make the form fit the mood and meaning of a poem. Unlike prose, poetry has room for variation in line length, sentence structure, and punctuation. 

The term enjambment is the running on of a thought from one line, couplet or stanza to the next without a syntactical break. 

It originates from Nineteenth Century French poetry literally meaning a straddling, from enjamber to straddle. 

The opposite of enjambment is end-stopped.  

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Enter your comment here...

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Email (Address never made public)

Name

Website

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

Notify me of new comments via email.

Notify me of new posts via email.

Δ