This is a book about some of the ways in which Renaissance poets ended lines of poetry. Line endings have not attracted much critical attention as a whole, although there is certainly a large body of scholarship on line endings in particular poems and on some of the subjects that I shall discuss in this book. There is, for instance, substantial critical discourse on rhyme and in the paragraphs that follow this I mention both a book that focuses on how poems end and one that looks as the line as a unit. But I want to focus more attention on line endings in general, as I think they are, or can be, the defining feature of the poem. In an interview with L. S. Dembo in 1968, the poet George Oppen said that

One way to paraphrase this would be to say that line endings call attention to themselves and shape the poem for readers as they create the poem on the page. This, at least, is what line endings should do. Many line endings are unemphatic and seem completely arbitrary, but in this book, I’ll look at line endings that are noticeable and sometimes even obtrusive.

When I wrote in the first paragraph that line endings are the defining features of the poem, I meant “defining” in both its literal and metaphorical senses, as the line breaks are what create a poem. If a poem did not have line breaks but instead marched relentlessly from margin to margin, then it would just be prose. The breaks, the white spaces that follow each poetic line, allow us to recognize a poem as a poem even if we cannot make out or understand the words or even identify the language in which the text is written: the unusual amount of blank space on the right side of the page (unusual compared to prose, that is) tells us that we’re looking at a poem.

I hope to have shown throughout this book how important the choice of words to end lines is. The sestina form is especially interesting in this regard. In the case of blank verse or free verse, the choice of end words is almost boundless; in the case of rhyming poetry, there is typically a wide choice for each succeeding rhyme; in the case of the sestina, the choice is restricted to the first stanza. After that, the sestina moves inexorably through its various permutations. While different poets may use different patterns of repetition, the repetition is always present. Because of this, the sestina might seem to be the perfect example of how form can come to dictate content and not just to give it a shape. One objection to this idea is that the opposition of form to content is often, if not always, a false dichotomy. Here, I am thinking of a comment made by the America poet Robert Creeley: “content is never more than an extension of form and form is never more than an extension of content.” Creeley’s repeated “never” is rather too emphatic, but it is certainly true that when we think about any art object we should try to think about form and content together. As Kimberly Johnson has recently pointed out, “the work of art must be encountered not as a transparent window onto a narrative (content) nor as a set of denarrativized obstructions (form) but rather as a mechanism that modulates between the two.” With its highly conspicuous form, a form that is further emphasized in the relatively rare rhyming version that is one of my concerns in this chapter, a really successful sestina is especially well equipped to give us the opportunity to consider form and content in close relation.

It has to be admitted that there are more failed sestinas than successful ones, however. Far too many sestinas show signs of the poet’s straining to work within the set form. By contrast, in a successful sestina the poet works the content and the form together: the extent to which the form threatens to overwhelm the content can become the content.

In this final section I turn to a consideration of how recent poets have dealt with the challenges and opportunities afforded by line endings. As I wrote in the introduction, I won’t be concerned with rhyme here, as I don’t feel that contemporary rhyming poems—however distinguished many of them may be—really extend our knowledge of how rhyme can work. Instead, I’ll look at a few examples of what strike me as interesting examples of enjambment and of the sestina. Without having to adhere to conventions governing the number of syllables and of stresses in a line, poets are free to put line endings wherever they want, and thus rather than being predetermined (because the poet has completed a line of iambic pentameter, for instance), line endings are solely the result of a poet’s choice. I would argue that because of this fact, line endings in free verse are more highly marked from the outset than line endings in formal verse. Some poets writing in free verse give the impression of not caring much about lineation, but many use lineation and, especially, enjambment as a way to guide the reader through the poem and to emphasize particular words and phrases.

My first example of enjambment is Lucille Clifton’s “study the masters.” Before I deal with this poem, however, I want to look at W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” which is its intertext. Auden’s poem juxtaposes the grand stories that are the ostensible subject of paintings by the great Renaissance painters called the Old Masters with, as he puts it, their “human position” (3). By this, he means the relationship of “the miraculous birth” (6) that is the occasion for the painting to what the picture also shows: children (7-8), dogs (12), a horse (12-13); all living lives independently of the grand narrative that is the painting’s ostensible subject. In the second stanza, Auden becomes specific and names “Breughel’s Icarus” (14), which is located in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels. Auden draws our attention to “the ploughman” (15) who appears in the foreground of the painting and to “the expensive delicate ship” (19) sailing by what is, as Auden notes, “Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky” (20).

One of the most interesting discussions of enjambment is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “A Poem is Being Written” from Tendencies. Writing of what she appealingly calls “the heroics of enjambment,” Sedgwick tells us that as a child she “visualized enjambment very clearly as not only … the poetic gesture of straddling lines together syntactically, but also a pushing apart of lines.” Critics pointing to instances of enjambment in the poems they’re discussing tend to focus either on the straddling together or the pushing apart; in what follows, I’ll try to keep both in mind. Paradoxically, if perhaps unsurprisingly, in running over the end of the line, enjambments draw attention to the very line endings they seem to disregard: they are simultaneously a breach and an observance, as Hamlet might say. An enjambment typically gives us a complete phrase, providing, for example, the noun modified by the adjective at the end of the line, but in so doing, it also acknowledges the power of the line as the basic unit of poetry. As Dominick Knowles and Mathilda Cullen put it in their recent collection: “enjambment scratches the line’s itch to / end – without ending –.” I pointed out in the introduction that a poem is a visual object, recognizable as verse by the blank spaces to the right of the printed words. Enjambment does not disturb this picture. Enjambments often change the nature of our experience of reading a poem, but they only exist because of the line. As Knowles and Cullen suggest, an enjambment is at once an ending and not an ending.

I wrote in the introduction that at each line ending, the poem renegotiates its relation to the world. This renegotiation is most perceptible with enjambment. An end-stopped line leads to something new, although of course this newness is qualified by our knowledge of how poetry operates and, often, by the fact that we know the line will rhyme with an earlier rhyme or, in the case of a sestina, will copy an earlier teleuton. With an enjambed line, we know something—the line to come will supply the direct or indirect object of a verb, for example—but not everything.

The most disapproving view of rhyme is that it is a merely decorative element. This idea has been promoted by many writers for many years—and it may well be the dominant view now. Part of the objection to rhyme is the fear that rhyme may dictate the poetry, compelling poets to express themselves otherwise than they would have intended. An extreme illustration of the importance of rhyme is the once fashionable game of bouts-rimés, in which players were given the rhymes for a poem they would then have to write. An especially good example of what this could mean comes from an anonymous eighteenth-century poem, “The Poetess’s Bouts-Rimés”:

In its diction and its sentiments, this is clearly a very conventional poem of the period, one that conforms to received ideas about eighteenth-century poetry and about women’s poetry. What follows is, to put it mildly, less conventional: the only words in the remaining eight lines are the rhyme words, which appear in the following order: “desire,” “fire,” “lie,” “thigh,” “wide,” “ride,” “night,” “delight.” “The Poetess’s Bouts-Rimés” gestures toward the possibility of a poem that is only rhyme without anything else at all.

Rhyme is not usually as important as it in this poem, of course. To me, one of the most interesting looks at the limitations of rhyme comes from Andrew Marvell’s poem “On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost,” which was first printed in 1674 in the second edition of Milton’s poem. After discussing the many strengths of the poem as a whole, Marvell addresses the then unusual fact that Milton’s epic does not rhyme: “Well mightst thou scorn thy Readers to allure / With tinkling Rime” (45-6). He goes on to dismiss rhyme as merely a kind of accessory that “we for fashion wear” (50) and then gracefully admits his own complicity in the matter: “I too transported by the Mode offend, / And while I meant to Praise thee must Commend” (51-2).