Enjambement is the breaking of a linguistic unit (phrase, clause or sentence) by the end of a line or between two verses. It is in contrast with end stopping, where each linguistic unit corresponds with the line length. The term is directly borrowed from French. In English, it is also frequently spelt enjambment.
The following lines from T.S. Eliot's poem "Gerontion" are heavily enjambed:
"After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions"
Meaning flows from line to line, and the reader's eye is pulled forward. Enjambement creates a feeling of acceleration, as the reader is forced to continue reading after the line has ended. Compare the enjambed Eliot with these lines, from Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Criticism", which are completely end stopped:
"Nature to all things fix'd the Limits fit,
And wisely curb'd proud Man's pretending Wit:"
Each line is formally correspondent with a unit of thought — in this case, a clause of a sentence.
Enjambment (also spelled "enjambement") is the breaking of a syntactic unit (a phrase, clause, or sentence) by the end of a line or between two verses.
Enjambment creates a feeling of acceleration, as the reader is forced to continue reading after the line has ended.
End-stopping is more frequent in early Shakespeare: as his style developed, the proportion of enjambment in his plays increased.
It claims that in an enjambment the performer may convey both the verse line boundary and the run-on sentence as perceptual units, however strained, by having recourse to conflicting phonetic cues: cues of continuity and discontinuity simultaneously.
I collected responses to these two performances from a wide range of listeners, who were unanimous in their judgment that in one of the two readings, but not in the other one, both the verse line and the run-on sentence are perceived as perceptual units.
Enjambment is an obvious instance in which linguistic units and versification conflict.
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