As If From a Springboard

Rethinking the idea of "the line" in poetry

A damaged manuscript page from the Exeter Book, showing the unlineated text of the Old English poem known as “The Ruin”

After last week’s post on claims that the winners of this year’s National Poetry Competition were “mere” or “artless” prose, I’ve been thinking about why the idea of the poetic “line” is often such a sticking point in the appreciation of new poetry.

I love a memorable line: during lockdown — when we all did odd things — I tweeted a thread of all the lines of poetry I could recall on my daily walk. A chequebook and pentameter* to anyone who can identify the first five without Googling:

* Note for younger readers: this is a joke about the 1980s BBC quiz show Blankety Blank, which offered contestants a “chequebook and pen” as a prize.

The poetic line is one of humanity’s enduringly beautiful inventions: the original voice note, which has cheered or consoled almost everyone who has used language.

And yet: when I come up against narrow arguments about what qualifies as poetry, accepted forms of “the line” loom as the thing that needs dismantling. The Welsh poet Lynette Roberts touched on the problem in the preface to her long poem of the Second World War, Gods with Stainless Ears (1950), which begins by defending her use of an irregular five-line stanza:

Not liking varied metre forms in a long poem, short-lipped lyrics interspersed with heavy marching strides, and not feeling too comfortable within the strict limits of the heroic couplet (wanting elbow room and breathing space), I decided to use the same structure throughout, changing only the rhythm, texture and tone internally.

It’s striking how embodied Roberts’ characterisation of poetic form is here. Rather than “short-lined” or “tight-lipped”, she coins the portmanteau “short-lipped”, associating form and feeling, and continues this association with “heavy marching strides”. I read this as a tacit criticism of Four Quartets (1944), the wartime poem written by Roberts’ editor at Faber and Faber, T.S. Eliot. One implication, I think, is that her experience of war as a young woman was different to his as a middle-aged man. Eliot spent the early Forties between his office and flat in London and the English countryside, looked after by friends. The meditative detachment of Four Quartets — with its short-lipped rhyming lyrics and long-lined philosophising — echoes his relatively luxurious access to moments of peace in the midst of war.

T.S. Eliot, “East Coker” (1940), from Four Quartets

Roberts, by contrast, living alone without her soldier husband, was impoverished and confined to a tiny rural cottage, where she had a miscarriage. Here is her description of that experience:

But reality worse than the pain intrudes,

And no near doctor for six days. This

Also is added truth. Razed for lack of

Incomputable finance. For womb was

Fresh as the day and solid as your hand

To want “elbow room and breathing space” was not just metaphor. With the irregular “rhythm, texture and tone” of stanzas such as this Roberts asserts her physical experience of the war in a way that is neither reticent (“short-lipped”) nor confident (“heavy marching strides”). This is not to say that she doesn’t manage to make lines of verse as memorable as anything in Eliot: “Fresh as the day and solid as your hand”. But this resonance arrives as a kind of relief after the jarring awkwardness of lines broken at “This”, “of”, and “was”. As she also wrote in the preface to Gods with Stainless Ears, certain lines intentionally express a time of “muddled and intense thought”.

I wrote last year about my interest in haphazard line-breaks, and how modern poetry doesn’t necessarily assume a single enjambment has any particular significance, beyond the way it shapes the whole poem. That post is free to read here:

For paid subscribers this week, I’ve revised an extract from an essay I wrote for The Stinging Fly magazine in Summer 2022, called “Get in Line: on Poetry and the Flow of Form”. In it, I try to ask what “the line” does: for poets, for critics, and for readers. Thanks to Cal Doyle for the invitation to write it.