Why Is Poetry Broken into Lines? (And How I Figured it Out)

Okay, so we all know poetry is broken into lines, but, like, why?

If you were to ask people what makes poetry poetry, I’m willing to bet that rhyme might be the most common answer but that lines wouldn’t be too far behind.

The line is one of the most distinguishing features of poetry. In fact, one of the big divides in the writing world is between poetry and prose. 

When you write prose, you’re just writing sentences and paragraphs—you go to the next line when you hit the edge of the page. 

But, even though you’re still working with sentences in poetry, you’re also thinking in terms of lines and stanzas. Those don’t break at the edges of the page or even, often, at the ends of sentences. 

So what are those lines doing? Why break perfectly normal sentences up like that and scatter them across the page? Why not just write paragraphs like everyone else?

Well, it’s a great question—and it’s one that I really didn’t have a useful answer to for a long time. So, in an effort to shed some light on the mystery of the line, I thought I’d share my own winding path to understanding and what I’ve learned about lines since I started writing poetry.

[earliest lines]

For many of us, our earliest encounters with lineated verse forms may have been nursery rhymes, little ditties broken into strongly rhythmic and rhyming lines. 

Hey diddle diddle/the cat and the fiddle

Humpty dumpty sat on a wall/humpty dumpty had a great fall

And the strong sounds in these lines point to an early purpose of the line —to aid memory. Because our ear gets used to the regularity of the rhythm and rhyme, it becomes much easier to remember the verse.

Imagine, for example, how much more challenging it would be to remember something like:

Hey, sizzle praxis, the cat and the French horn,

The cow launched itself over a waxing gibbous,

The little dog thought it was awfully funny, showing it with laughter

And the dish took the opportunity to leave, taking the spoon along as well

Old poetry like the Greek epics were marked by rhythmic patterns that made it easier to memorize and remember culturally important texts. The regularity of the sounds could serve as a cue to know which words came next.

For example, you might not remember who the dish ran away with, but you know it rhymes with moon, so that helps to narrow it down. 

So that might be an initial important reason that poetry is broken into lines: it can serve a really practical purpose in sustaining the memory of important texts. 

But, of course, so much of modern poetry doesn’t rhyme at regular intervals if it rhymes at all. And rhythm has much less to do with consistent metrical patterns than it used to. 

So if lines aren’t just auditory memory tools anymore, what are they?

Bad lines to no lines

When I started taking poetry more seriously in college, I remember breaking lines without any real rhyme or reason. Write some words, hit return, write some more words, hit return. 

I also had it in mind that the first word of each line was the most important, so it was a little surprising to get poems back from my teacher at the time with comments and markings rearranging my lines so that they ended on more interesting words than the, under and but.

Really, I think that was my first lesson about the line: the last word in a line is a focal point for attention, so where you end a line matters much more than where you start it.

But knowing where to end lines wasn’t enough to make me feel like I knew what the rest of the line was doing, so you can imagine my delight when this same teacher opened my eyes to the world of prose poetry!

Imagine poetry but without lines—it all just happens in a paragraph or two! I was invested in so many aspects of poetry like imagery, precision, and compression, but the line was a mystery. So prose poetry gave me a way to write poems without having to worry about lines.

Plus they had that kind of convention-flouting edge to them that let me feel like I was some kind of artistic maverick. When I finished college and went on to poetry school, a lot of my first pieces there were prose poems. 

And it was mostly because it let me cover an insecurity with something that I thought made me look cool. 

And, to be clear, I still love a good prose poem, but I am glad that I didn’t get stuck there. 

The epiphany

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but, when I was in poetry school, former poet laureate Rita Dove visited the program and held a workshop with the graduate students. Any time a poet visited, I always listened carefully to how they talked about lines in an effort to figure them out, and, on the day Rita Dove visited, something clicked. 

At one point, when she was answering someone’s question, she said that a line should have integrity. That there should be something holding the line together as a line, some reason for putting those few words together in space. 

That integrity could be based on image, a line meant to convey a moment.

It could be based on sound, like alliteration or rhythm.

It could be built around meaning, putting emphasis on particular words or even rearranging the sentence to create interesting secondary meanings.

It didn’t matter what it was—but, as she said, each line has to have some kind of integrity. And, at that moment, I got it. And I started revising my prose poems into lines. 

Demo: why lines?

So we could talk about lines and poetry all day, but I wanted to end by showing you something that I like to ask my own students to do—and that seems to make the idea of lines click for many of them as well. 

This is something you can try on your own, but I’ll show you how I might do it and talk about it along the way. And, to get us started, you’ll need your own first draft of short prose poem, lyrical paragraph, poem without lines, whatever you want to call it. Something like this:

The Attempt

I woke up too early for a Saturday, tight-coiled pain seething along the curve of my skull and into my neck. So now, the pain hollowed out by aspirin, I settle into the love seat. The washer sloshes, the dryer bumps and hums from the other room, and robins and sparrows chatter outside in the trees. Under a light blanket’s easy warmth, I close my eyes, willing a surrender to a few minutes of sleep before getting to work. I wait, watching the lightening and darkening as patchy clouds slide beside the sun. And, still, still, I wait.

Don’t worry if it’s a triumph of literature—it’s just a draft, and our mission is to uncover the secret of the line, nothing more.

So, once you have your prose poem, your job is to turn it into two different lined poems, doing nothing more than breaking it up into lines in two different ways. So you’ll end up with something like this:

The Attempt (version1)

I woke up too early

for a Saturday, tight-coiled 

pain seething along the curve 

of my skull and into my neck. 

So now, the pain hollowed 

out by aspirin, 

I settle into the love seat. 

The washer sloshes, 

the dryer bumps and hums 

from the other room, 

and robins and sparrows 

chatter outside in the trees. 

Under a light blanket’s easy warmth, 

I close my eyes, willing 

a surrender to a few minutes 

of sleep before getting to work. 

I wait, watching 

the lightening and darkening 

as patchy clouds slide beside the sun.

And, still, 

still I wait.

The Attempt (version 2)

I woke up too early for a Saturday, 

tight-coiled pain seething along 

the curve of my skull and into my neck. 

So now, the pain hollowed out by aspirin, I settle

 into the love seat. The washer sloshes, 

the dryer bumps and hums from the other room, 

and robins and sparrows chatter outside 

in the trees. Under a light blanket’s easy warmth, 

I close my eyes, willing a surrender 

to a few minutes of sleep before getting to work. 

I wait, watching the lightening and darkening 

as patchy clouds slide beside the sun. 

And, still, still I wait.

Here you can see some experimentation with line and with stanzas—the content is the same, but the experience of reading changes. The lines of both versions control our attention and pacing in different ways.

So let’s take a look at a few lines and talk about how they work. 

In the first, we get a set of lines that are being driven by rhythm–

The waster sloshes, a nice little alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables

The dryer bumps and hums–iambic trimeter

And robins and sparrows–we get a little flavor of dactyls here

That slides into its natural conclusion with chatter outside in the trees

In the second version, 

The dryer bumps and hums from the other room–listen to all those ms and uhs–oh the onomatopoeia!

Some of these lines are grammatical–held together by a structural integrity–

Under the light blanket’s easy warmth–there’s a prepositional phrase

And the lightning and darkening is the object of the verb

Followed by a subordinate clause. 

In the second version, the first line is just a clause–no controversy there

But you can do other things too–use the line to create alternate readings of the syntax:

In the first version, the line break in the second line leaves you a split second of room to read tight-coiled as an adverbial modifier for the first line–the speaker of the poem woke up in a tight-coiled state–but, surprise, as you keep reading, you reframe the coil as modifying the pain.

Or, later on–I close my eyes, willing–for a second it reads as passive willingness, but then the syntax of the sentence pulls it back into a force of will–a deliberate urging on of the surrender. 

These are not what the sentences say, but the arrangement of lines gives the reader room to contemplate those secondary meanings for a second, adding a complexity to the piece that wouldn’t–and couldn’t exist–if the piece were just in a single paragraph. It’s like a hologram or something that changes color depending on the angle of the light. And it’s pretty darn cool.

And, if we looked at the two version side-by-side again, we could even characterize their overall approaches to the line. 

With shorter lines and more vertical length, the first version asks your eye to move around more. The second version, with longer lines, feels more like its prose counterpart. 

In general, I tend to read shorter lines as having more energy. Longer lines move slower–so they can be, perhaps, calmer, but they also run the risk of dragging. 

And, while there is room for wild variation in line length, both of these pieces tend to remain pretty consistent giving them a more cohesive sense than if we were alternating from single word lines to line built with 17 words and back again. Where consistently shorter lines are energetic, wildly varying lines may feel chaotic–and that’s not a bad thing so much as it is a thing to be aware of. If you’re after chaos, go for it. 

There are no strict rules–so just see what happens as you play around and take it from there.

Conclusion

So there you have it, an introduction to the line based on my own years-long journey to figure it out, at least a little. 

Whatever you do, just make sure it’s intentional. Give your lines integrity, a reason for being a single unit. 

And, of course, remember that this is for writing–never feel like you need to sit and figure out the governing principle of every line of poetry you’re reading. I mean, you can if you want to, but that seems like a quick way to make reading poetry more of a chore than anything else. 

But, when you’re writing, it’s a good rule of thumb to be on the lookout for integrity of some kind for each line. So follow your eye, follow your ear, follow your inner sense of what works–it’s okay to do this intuitively, and it will surely get more intuitive the more time you spend reading and writing good poems. 

So give it a shot and see what happens–and remember it’s all just drafts until you publish it. There’s no pressure to make it right or perfect until a minute before it ends up in a book somewhere. 

Just be sure to let me know how it goes–especially if you try out the exercise we did on your own. I’d love to hear what insights you get from breaking up your piece in different ways. 

Now, though, it looks like I’ve got a few drafts of a poem to play around with, so I think I’m going to go do that and leave you to do your own cool stuff. 

As always, thanks for watching–and happy writing until we meet again.