Toeing and Breaking the Line: On Enjambment and Caesura

Heather H. Yeung’s chapter makes the case for enjambment and caesura as the tremendously varied and tremendously significant “palpable unspoken invisibles of poetry”: while not carriers of meaning per se , they can dictate the rhythm and speed of our reading of a line of poetry, as well as distort or delay our understanding of the line’s meaning, or form a physical representation, a non-linguistic embodiment of it. Defining enjambment’s and the caesura’s functions as “over-running”, “over-reaching”, and “disrupting”; and “hesitation”, “propulsion”, and “rupture”, respectively, the chapter makes the case for a sustained engagement with these aspects of poetry while acknowledging that their function may not always be the same or of the same significance in non-Western or non-canonical contexts.