Glossary of Poetic Terms

  • The running-over of a sentence or phrase from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation; the opposite of end-stopped. William Carlos Williams’s “Between Walls” is one sentence broken into 10 enjambed lines:

           the back wings
           of the

           hospital where
           nothing

           will grow lie
           cinders

           in which shine
           the broken

           pieces of a green
           bottle

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