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Broken Lines
https://archive.holyworlds.org/viewtopic.php?f=173&t=9916
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Author:  kingjon [ March 31st, 2018, 4:48 pm ]
Post subject:  Broken Lines

In poetry written to a definite meter, poets occasionally, as a poetic device, break a line's "feet" among what one might call multiple "logical" lines. Most of the examples I can think of, other than one of my own poems, are in Shakespeare's plays, such as the beginning of the famous "All the World's a Stage" speech (which begins with those words after another character has just uttered a partial line of two and a half iambs). (I also remember encountering the device fairly often in e. e. cummings.)

There's two things about this device that I was hoping another reader might be able to help me with:

First, is there a name for this device? All I could think of was "enjambment," which is actually the opposite, when a "logical" line has too many feet and "spills over the bar" into the next line.

Second, can anyone think of any examples that don't involve multiple speakers or a stanza break between the two halves of a line, and are in the public domain? (I'm working on a blog-post tutorial about typesetting poetry, and I don't want to infringe on anyone's copyright, but I want to cover typesetting poetry using this device before I get into multiple-stanza poems.)

For more general discussion, though, have any other Holy Worlder poets used this device? I think I've only ever used it the once (so far), but I can easily imagine doing so again if a poem came to a similar circumstance.

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