Enjambment is the continuation of a sentence or clause across a poetic line break.
History of Enjambment
Enjambment comes from the French word enjamber, which means “to stride over.” An enjambed line is the opposite of an end-stopped line, in that the running-over of a sentence or phrase across one poetic line to the next is done without punctuation, whereas an end-stopped line ends a poetic line with punctuation. Enjambment is commonly used by poets because, without punctuation, enjambed lines minimize the difference of sound between verse and prose, while increasing the speed and pacing of a poem. At times, a poem will contain both enjambed and end-stopped lines. The term “enjambment” was first formally used in the mid-nineteenth century, but the poetic device can be traced back to Biblical verses and the work of Homer.
Examples of Enjambment
Enjambment became a key feature for twentieth-century poets part of the Modernist, Imagist, and Black Arts movements. One classic example of how enjambment is used to flow from one line to the next, breaking up words like “wheelbarrow” and “rainwater” is “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Another classic example of enjambment and how the device influences a poem’s prosody while also emphasizing the poem’s subject is Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool:”
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
Other well-known and contemporary examples include “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot, “Crepuscule” by E. E. Cummings, “won’t you celebrate with me” by Lucille Clifton, “For Crying Out Loud” by Terrance Hayes, and “I Cast It Away, My Body:” by b: William bearhart.