It is a mystery, because it is quite possible to have a whole tradition in which enjambment never occurs. For example, in many poems of Baudelaire. Not every line ends with a punctuation mark, but usually there is a pause, and the next line begins with a prepositional phrase, or the predicate of a sentence. If you wrote it out as prose the metrical divisions would still be obvious. Despite the fact that French lacks accent.
At the other extreme are traditions in which enjambment is the norm, like English blank verse. The question is to what extent the line of verse coincides with the grammatical unit. Also, the particular rhetorical effects of enjambment. Is it a poetic device? Is the end stopped line a poetic device, or just a norm?
It's possible to say that the end-stopped line is limiting, and transcending it is a good thing, without thinking there is anything wrong with Racine or Pope.
I'm sorry my thinking on this is very murky, but I promise I will come to some clarity at some point.
2 comments:
This reminds me of one of my 111-word texts. I wrote this one before I started posting them individually to my blog, so I have to quote the whole thing here:
The doubling caused by enjambment in line two of Shakespeare's sonnet 116 doesn't involve literal and figurative senses, like metaphor. Instead, it's like zeugma: a later element alters an earlier element (as in Dickens). By itself, "love is not love" is nonsense, but it could mean that "a word doesn't mean what it says it means". The following relative clause alters that sense: inconstant love isn't love – or, a word may be used incorrectly. With the enjambment, then, the sense of "love is not love" itself "finds alteration" as the relative clause alters the meaning of the main clause. As enjambment is a figure, then, is poetic form in general rhetoric? (Andrew Shields, #111words, 28 January)
"Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds" (William Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI)
"Mr. Pickwick took a seat and the paper" (Charles Dickens, "The Pickwick Papers")
That's good. I would argue that it is a special case of enjambment when there is a possible syntactical pause there, and you still have enjambment.
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