Enjambment - Philosophical Concept | Alexandria
Enjambment, a poetic technique whose name whispers of striding and transgression, describes the continuation of a sentence or phrase from one line of verse into the next without a pause. Often called "run-on lines," it challenges the expectation that a line's end coincides with a completed thought. Its deceptive simplicity masks a power to manipulate rhythm, pace, and emphasis, urging a reader onward, subtly altering the experience of the poem.
Claims of enjambment's origins are difficult to pin down. While examples may exist earlier, its deliberate and increasingly sophisticated use surfaces notably in Middle English poetry. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, completed around 1400, provides ample evidence of its nascent employment. Chaucer’s masterful weaving of narrative and character demonstrates an awareness of how lines could bleed meaning into one another, propelling the reader forward. This occurs against the backdrop of the late medieval period, a time of immense social upheaval marked by the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, and simmering religious dissent—a link between formal poetic innovation and societal flux.
The technique flourished throughout subsequent centuries, experiencing significant evolution during the Renaissance, where poets experimented with breaking free from rigid metrical constraints. John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), for example, showcases enjambment on an epic scale, reflecting the poem's ambition and subversion. Later, the Romantic poets, with their emphasis on emotion and natural speech rhythms, further embraced the technique, using it to create fluidity and immediacy. But could it be so simple as just freedom of the writer? Some critics posit that the use of enjambment coincided with the increase in availability of reading materials, and, essentially created another avenue for a writer to manipulate the reader for financial gain.
Enjambment remains essential in contemporary poetry, offering modern poets tools for disrupting convention, mirroring the fragmented nature of modern experience, and continuing to engage us as readers, forcing us to participate in the construction of meaning. Has this technique of line-breaking always been an innocent, artistic choice, or is it a subtle subversion with roots in the economics of art, forever prompting us to question where the boundaries between form and freedom truly lie?