Whitman to me was an instrument... he started us on the course of our researches
into the nature of the line by breaking finally with English prosody. After him there has been
for us no line. --W. C. Williams
J. Kruse (2012), who cited the Williams passage above, has observed that one main reason for the lack of technical terminology for enjambment, despite the noted fact of its presence in the classical languages, is the distinction held in linguistic typology between analytic and synthetic languages. Enjambment would then be a feature more noticeable in analytic languages like English where sense depends heavily on word order. But is enjambment really noticeable without the aid of the visual dimension of the written or printed page? Can I hear an enjambed line in the microsecond it occupies as a prosodic boundary between words or phrases? In the delivery instance of a text without canonic phonic markers such as stichs, rhymes, caesuras, or alliterations, won’t it be more likely that the utterance would be prosodically parsed following either the speaker's pacing or the listener's sense of syntactic order? Enjambment would then seem to be of a different order. It is not bound by canonic phrase groupings or junctures and even by standard orthography (e.g., E. E. Cummings). No necessity binds it to the physiological rhythms characteristic of actual human breathing either. We can probably say for enjambent, as much for free verse, that its dynamic overflows that of the metrical, the grammatical, and the phonological.
This argues, then, for the visual nature of enjambment, a device that, for analytic languages, is highly dependent on its recognition as a graphic feature scanned during silent reading. Following Bradford’s statement about enjambment in his Graphic Poetics, we can then look at this scriptural device as an axis that serves as the contrapuntal play between the Eye and the Ear, implying the crucial involvement of the visual (written or printed) dimension in its mechanics. An enjambment would be like an “eye pause” because it is more readily perceived by the eye than by the ear. To take account of this mechanism, we will need what Kruse observed as lacking in the study of this device: technical terms for its discussion, terms which we can mine from today’s studies in typography, graphematics, and grammatology. From a canonical point of view, the modulation in the configuration of the line in verbal and visual terms is interpreted as a movement bending toward or away from the axiomatic orders of grammatical syntax, metrical line, and phonological structure. This canonic triangulation needs to imagine the ground of perception and the "celestial" frames as highly-determined systems (immobile points) so that we can draw any discursive trajectory as an isomorphic mapping among various semiotic subsystems.
Free verse would be that motion where complete information or totality is absent, and where the trajectory is not guided by fixed stars but by the projected mapping motion of those posited frames of reference in relation to an imagined stable ground of discourse. That map would be based on previous cultural memory that is constantly being redrawn or revised on-the-fly (cf. D. Davidson’s “radical interpretation”), and poetic discourse would be the laboratory where all these moving references are being tested and probed. The oscillatory Gestalt of poetic discourse comes from the metalinguistic play it stages in the invocation of those projected structures in memory, either satisfying our deepest desire for a confirmation of a hidden but complete Order (a theological canvas), or upsetting this desire by delaying or dislocating the imaginary coherence of the “line” as a utopian mapping among linguistic, typographic, and semantic planes (or structural, vehicular, and referential bundles).
This delay is all the more made operational by the semiotic and technological reflexivity it imposes upon the reader by forcing a comparison between her expectations of linguistic order (or “deeper” meaning) and the unusual reconfiguration of the poetic text, thereby reopening the field to a perceptual crisis that brokers the return of the aesthetic via the ascendancy of asymmetry, incongruity, and anisomorphism. The diagrammatic map, invested on the utopia of equivalences, would barely hold the parts together in the absence of the whole. The whole is exactly what is delayed or suspended, whose horizon is posited or imagined as somehow already attained or circumscribed. We can repeat here what Derrida has said about Saussure’s langue: no one has yet encountered the whole in its totality. In the infinitely slow arrival of the whole, free verse would primarily operate as a metaprosodic trajectory tracing the echoes of ideal systems as distant allegories.
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