Broken promises

By E.H.

ENJAMBMENT rarely makes the news. It may have reams of academic essays devoted to it, but less recondite publications have, understandably, steered clear of the poetic device, by which one line of verse is broken into several.

Until now, that is. First, Tesco, a British supermarket chain, took out advertisements in national newspapers apologising for the discovery of horsemeat in their processed food. These looked like they had been written in lines of free verse, with statements wound down over separate lines:

This starts
with us

Or:

Seriously.
This is it.
We are changing.

Then, a couple of weeks later, Twitter made it possible to include line-breaks in tweets. Suddenly enjambment was trending on social media.

But many poetry geeks (this Johnson included) will be quick to point out that Tesco, and many Twitter users, failed to exploit enjambment's full potential (or, for that matter, that they are very good poetry). In “The Force of Poetry”, Christopher Ricks, formerly the Oxford Professor of Poetry who is now at Boston University, writes elegantly of the way enjambment can make language seem elastic:

Lineation in verse creates units which may or may not turn out to be units of sense; the "flicker of hesitation"…as to what the unit of sense actually is—a flicker resolved when we round the corner into the next line—can create nuances which are central to the poet’s enterprise.

Mr Ricks cites some fine examples, such as John Milton's use of the device to turn an intransitive verb to a transitive one in two lines from “Paradise Lost”:

Then feed on thoughts, that involuntary move
Harmonious numbers.

Add rhyme and enjambment can alter the sense of a poem even more deeply. Even outside of strict metered verse, such as in the poetry of e.e. cummings, it can make poetry surprising and playful.

Tesco's stab was certainly surprising. But likening it, as some British newspapers have, to something that might be compared to a Shakespearean sonnet or analysed by a Cambridge professor is a stretch. The line endings seemed more pompous rather than playful and to be dictated more by the startling white space of the background than a clear poetic goal. To be fair, Twitter’s offerings were more fun, albeit still somewhat unsophisticated:

And the rest was...
only a line break
away from decrepitude
and loss and all that's better off
unmentioned and relegated
to Twitter

Mainstream media are unlikely to wax eloquent about enjambment again anytime soon. But who knows what experimentation in the social sort will bring.