Line breaks in poetry have evolved from conforming to specific meters and structures to being used for artistic effects. The use of line breaks has contributed to the fragmentation and abstraction of modern poetry, and is important for displaying poetry on digital devices.
A line break in poetry occurs when the writer finishes a specific line of text and starts on the line below it. This standard convention in poetry has changed along with the various poetic forms of different eras. In the modern era, poets often make use of multiple line breaks to break up sentences and even single words, for various kinds of artistic effects.
In classical Western poetry, line breaks often conform to specific poetic meters, with rhyming pairs or quatrains. Line breaks were part of a rigid system of creating symmetrical and direct poems that expressed classical ideas and emotions in standard ways.
As fixed verse or highly structured conventional poetry began to give way to freer poetic techniques, the ways poets used line breaks changed too. Here, literature students began to distinguish between endstop, where a specific idea coincided with the end of a line, and enjambment, where an individual idea or sentence continued over a series of poetic lines. Poets began to use line breaks prolifically to express somewhat arbitrary pauses or for other dramatic effect.
As the line break began to be more and more common in poetry, many forms of modern poetry began to appear more abstract. Poetry lines in general have become much more fragmented, where a typical line may not include an entire sentence or set metre. The line break began to function as a way of organizing short, more abstract sentences into a general pattern that the reader often had to understand intuitively, which remains part of the challenge of reading modern poetry.
Poets often understand that the technical use of line breaks is the use of white space on a page to display a poem or other piece of writing. As poetry has evolved over the last century, the use of white space has become increasingly important. Posting methods have also changed, which perhaps contributes to the general use of a line break. For example, much modern poetry that is streamed via Internet browsers or smart phone devices may require specific types of line breaks that effectively display the poem or other piece of writing when read on these devices. The line break is thus an important but sometimes overlooked resource for modern poets and writers.
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