# Writing Poetry: End-Stops, Enjambment, and Caesura



## Ariel (Dec 9, 2016)

_I'm posting this though I'm not happy with the quality.  I apologize in advance._*

Writing Poetry: End Stop, Enjambment, and Caesura*

The line in poetry differs from the line in prose in that where the line breaks on the page is determined by the poet and not by an arbitrary margin.  There are a few basic ways that a poet can determine where to break a line.  The first is by mandates of a form.  If a poet is using a specific form or meter, that form or meter will tell the poet where to break the line.  However, if the poet is writing in free verse that determination is entirely on the poet.  This choice should be deliberate and inform meaning in the poem.  

In free form there are a few considerations the poet might take in to determine where and when to break his or her line.  Miller Williams states in _Patterns of Poetry: an Encyclopedia of Forms, _“No matter how purely accentual a line may be until the end, it is the nature of the language that the last syllables in the line are going to be recognizable and the reader is going to hear them as accented or not (185).”  That accent on the last few words of a line imparts import and meaning to the last words of a line.  It informs the reader of the weight that word should carry.

A line that terminates with the phrase or sentence is called end-stopped.  Lewis Turco calls it “cloture,” however, other references and definitions of cloture means to bring a debate to an end.    End-stopped lines bring a sense of ritual to the line.  It gives the reader a pause for breath before being pulled forward.  Lines ending in a comma, semi-colon, dash, or ending punctuation are all considered end-stopped.

The opposite of an end-stopped line is enjambment.  Enjambment is when the line terminates at a point other than at the end of a phrase.  This tends to increase the feeling of informality and conversation.  It “pulls” a reader further into the poem instead of letting them rest at the end of a line.  It gives a sense of movement and of entangling ideas.

Finally there are caesuras which are when a syntactical unit ends in the middle of a line.  It’s a break in the movement or a pause in the middle of a line.  These usually accompany enjambment but can also be found with end-stopped lines.

It is also possible to use all of these in one poem.  For an example of each take a look at the opening lines of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.”  



> Had we but world enough and time,
> This coyness, lady, were no crime.
> We would sit down, and think which way
> To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
> ...


 
The first, second, fourth, eighth, and tenth lines are end-stopped, the third, fifth, sixth, seventh, and ninth lines are enjambed, and there are caesuras in lines two, three, four, five, six, and nine.

Varying the way the lines break enforces the message for the poet and makes the poem sound more conversational.  Marvell’s poem was published in 1681 and yet sounds very modern because of the way the lines break which emphasis the wry humor of the speaker.

Paying attention to where, when, and why a line breaks informs meaning and enforces the sounds of a poem.  Happy writing!

*Works Cited*

Hirsch, Edward. _Poet's Glossary._ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.

Turco, Lewis.  _The Book of Forms. _3rd ed., University Press of New England. 2000.

Willams, Miller. _Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms_. LSU Press. 1986.

“To His Coy Mistress”. _PoetryFoundation, _9 Dec 2016, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44688


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## Darkkin (Dec 11, 2016)

Caesura, stemming from the Latin roots of cease?  An ending of a metrical foot, but not necessarily the end of the line, similar to a clause, perchance?


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## EmmaSohan (Dec 11, 2016)

Shouldn't "refuse" start it's own line? I think it needs parallel form to "love" -- which the poet worked hard to start a line with.

Can I have another (modern?) example of where someone thinks enjambment worked well? I liked the example given, I just want to understand better.

Like this?

Reading about poetry
to understand prose. I know
that's strange. But
these are techniques of writing


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## Ariel (Dec 11, 2016)

Darkkin, I'm not sure on the entomology but yes, that definition.

Emma, I'll have more modern examples tomorrow.  I chose this poem in particular because I felt it showed all three items under discussion.   His rhyme scheme and meter is why that particular line ended with "refuse."

I would also like to point out that end-stopped lines and enjambment have nothing to do with prose. The margins and line breaks in prose are usually decided by a publisher which makes this discussion fairly worthless for the prose-writer.


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## Ariel (Dec 12, 2016)

For more modern examples:



			
				Margaret Atwood said:
			
		

> *Pig Song*
> 
> This is what you changed me to:
> a greypink vegetable with slug
> ...



https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/32772



			
				Billy Collins said:
			
		

> I ask them to take a poem
> and hold it up to the light
> like a color slide
> 
> ...



https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/46712


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## EmmaSohan (Dec 13, 2016)

To try to stimulate discussion: I would focus on the start of the line, not the end. You can see me doing that in my poem, and I will make the same suggestion for Collins



> But all they want to do is
> tie the poem to a chair with rope and
> torture a confession out of it.
> 
> ...


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## Ariel (Dec 13, 2016)

You're going to try to school a man who has twice been the POET LAUREATE of the United States?  Emma, this discussion is about the way lines break--not how they begin.

Not to mention, there is now emphasis with your breaks on the words "is," "and," and "to."  Those are not words any poet wants to emphasize.


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## PiP (Dec 13, 2016)

What about en spaces/white space? I'll see if I can find some examples


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## Ariel (Dec 13, 2016)

PiP said:


> What about em spaces? I'll see if I can find some examples


Do you mean an em dash, Pip?  Those are considered an end-stop at the end of lines and a caesura when in the middle.


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## Firemajic (Dec 13, 2016)

JMO, but I think this is one of the most difficult things to master... I understand the second example [originally posted by Billy Collins] The way the line breaks are used makes perfect sense to me. However, some poets use line breaks in ways that leave me wondering ... wondering if the line breaks were accidental, or very carefully used, and I am just not "getting it".... 

Soooo.... really... it is up to the poet?


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## PiP (Dec 13, 2016)

> amsawtell said:
> 
> 
> > Do you mean an em dash, Pip? Those are considered an end-stop at the end of lines and a caesura when in the middle.



No, I was referring to _extra _white space within the line of a poem as a form of caesura. My understanding is that it is to pace the reading of a poem within a line as opposed to white space as a divide between stanzas. Poetry is also visual so by including extaa spaces you are emphasing a point and giving the reader time to reflect

This is still a a relatively new concept to me so I could be a little hazy in my understanding of the purpose of its application.


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## Ariel (Dec 13, 2016)

PiP said:


> No, I was referring to _extra _white space within the line of a poem as a form of caesura. My understanding is that it is to pace the reading of a poem within a line as opposed to white space as a divide between stanzas. Poetry is also visual so by including extaa spaces you are emphasing a point and giving the reader time to reflect
> 
> This is still a a relatively new concept to me so I could be a little hazy in my understanding of the purpose of its application.



Okay, I know what you mean and I ran across one of those just the other day. If I remember where I'll get it posted up.  You are correct in their usage. 



Firemajic said:


> Soooo.... really... it is up to the poet?


In a nutshell, yes. There might be considerations other than whim that a poet uses to determine how a line ends.  For instance, Andrew Marvell's poem was accommodating a rhyme and meter.


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## clark (Dec 13, 2016)

AMSAWTELL -- Don't know why you apologized for the "quality" of your opener to this thread.  You wrote a succinct, inclusive summary of this complex issue.  Good job. I say.


Grabbing a number from the air, I'd guess that 90% of poetry written in the modern era is free verse, and I'd suggest the "era" maybe starts with HD, just before WW I, when she was editor of The Egotist.  Free verse essentially means that the poet has to reinvent the SHAPE of their work with every poem they write, a heady responsibility.  The internal 'devices' of poetry--assonance, alliteration, rhythm, tonal integrity, etc. --remain critical, in fact with the absence of end-rhyme and regularized metre, even greater weight falls on these 'devices' to keep a piece poetic.  Few novelists, intent on developing characters and forwarding plot, inculcate poetic qualities to their prose.  Cormac McCarthy is a notable exception.  Witness this brief passage from _All The Pretty Horses:

At the hour he'd always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted horses and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only.

_I find myself rocking in my chair when I read McCarthy, just as I do when I read poetry.  Hardly a defensible criterion for a definition of poetry, but interesting at the least, no?  I quoted that quick taste of McCarthy so that I could ask this important question:  is McCarthy writing poetry?  The envelope please--AH! the answer is 'No', because his PRIMARY purpose is to forward plot and develop characters as vehicles through whom to promote and advance the details of plot or tell his story.  Prose uses process to further its agenda which, in non-fiction, is to provide information so seamlessly that form disappears.  Business readers, for example, couldn't care less about the form of the message that tells them their shipment will be late and only passing interest in why it will be late--they want to know only ONE thing--*WHEN* WILL THEY GET THEIR STUFF !  So the writer gets that info in the first sentence, uses no adjectives, standard sentences (subject-verb-object), strips the language buck naked and to the point and ensures the piece is no more than about four lines long.  Fiction writers--thank God!--do not take that 'lean and hungry' approach to style, but however ornate a novelist's style might be, their primary purpose is to advance their story, not invite primary attention to the _way_ in which the story is told.

For me, the two seminal statements on this very difficult issue were made in the 1950s by Charles Olson in his essay Projective Verse and by Robert Creeley.  The former is a dense and difficult read.  Distilled to an absurd simplicity, it comes down to 'phasing' the words and lines on the page in terms of breath units or natural pulses, rather than grammar, sentence structure, or even phrasal logic--tho such units may well (and do) often coincide with breath units.  The latter, Creeley's statement in a letter to Olson is deceiving in its simplicity.  Creeley said:  FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT.  Whoof!  Just when I think I've fully absorbed what that statement means, the damned thing slithers away from me like an eel in a tub of olive oil. . . .  I found some help from an unlikely source, which I highly recommend to everyone who hasn't heard it--Keith Jarrett's _Koln Concert.  _(longest jazz piano solo ever)  Pretty sure the entire concert in on YouTube_.  _In the first 1/4 of the piece you'll hear him searching, searching, searching for the full FORM of the piece.  Then the music finds it, and the rest is. . .enough of me.  PLEASE go listen to it.

Amsawtell's excellent summary, which started this thread, deals with the core of dealing with the freedom of free verse, if you will.  Firemajic asks, "Soooo.... really... it is up to the poet?"  Yes, it is, but with constraints in the same way that the Declaration of Independence does NOT mean that individuals are free to run about independently doing whatever to hell they want.  The core idea of Form Is Never More Than An Extension of Content is that the one will find the other in a marriage of 'rightness' that is declared by their indivisibility.  Their fusion.  Alexander Pope used and perfected the closed or so-called Heroic couplet because he thought aphoristically and wanted to express himself in tight, contained units of thought or description.  The closed couplet was the perfect vehicle for his artistic needs and the aesthetic 'tidiness' of his times.  The same period produced miniature paintings and the cameo brooch.

What this rambling (I'm good at that.  It's a definite talent. . .)post comes down to is:  if the poet is truly tuned into his or her content and is projecting it naturally and honestly onto the page, the devices used will seem emotionally fused to the content itself.  If a white space appears mid-line between two words that might not normally be separated, some kind of discernible aesthetic logic should be in play.  And that little point introduces a critical component in much free verse tat is rarely even mentioned when we address 'conventional' poetry.  Free verse of the kind I've been concerned with here (and Amsawtell too, methinks) should ideally be read ALOUD for the breathing of the poet to be discernible.  Reading aloud necessarily involves the reader in the tissue of the poem in an involved and intimate way not expected of 'conventional' poetry.  Of course we become involved in 'conventional' poetry, but not as _participants and co-authors _for heaven's sake!  But surely it is true that when we try to 'breathe' our way thru a free verse poem, we are joining the poet's terms of creativity in a unique way.  We are in a sense actually helping write the poem.

Sorry if I'm a bit all over the lot.  As a poet, I find this whole proposition about form being an extension of content very heady stuff. . .very important stuff for all of us, and thanks to Amsawtell for showing the way


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## EmmaSohan (Dec 13, 2016)

Clark, I want to talk about this, but I will stick to enjambment for the moment. I am a prose writer, but I think I can learn from what amsawtell is teaching, and I thank her for that. She has suggested that I cannot learn from this lesson because I am a prose writer. But I find basic principles of communication.

I suggested that we need to pay attention to what enjambment does to the start of next line. That seems plausible to me. Is that just my perspective from prose? I don't get it.

Laughing, I suggested a change in enjambment that destroyed the rhyme! I didn't realize the poem rhymed! That was one of the stupidest suggestions I have ever read. I can see it would take a lot patience to have a prose writer in this discussion. Thanks for that.


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## Ariel (Dec 13, 2016)

I think you are thinking of poetic lines in the same way you would lines of prose, Emma.  While this will aid the grammatical structure of any poem you write it damages the things that you could do with the line. For instance a friend of mine wrote:



> You helped me up the steps, baby
> 
> steps.


See how with the enjambment across two stanzas forces "baby" to mean two different things and to work in two different ways? (I apologize to my friend, I'm quoting from memory).  

You're right in that the beginning of a line has an emphasis on it too.  However, the end of the line has more of a stress than the beginning in poetry.  It's also a visual medium.  A reader'S eyes will be drawn to the end of lines first.


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## RHPeat (Dec 14, 2016)

Amsawtell

That's using enjambment to form a "Pun Metaphor" on the end of the line. Double meanings due to the line breaks. However pun metaphors can be found mid line as well due to caesuras as another device. 

a poet friend
RH Peat


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## clark (Dec 14, 2016)

Emma -- Enjambment could also be relevant, I suppose, in a kind of avant garde prose that co-mixed poetic form and prose.  Nothing wrong with that, but in such writing, the enjambment usually occurs in the poetry section, because that's where enjambment is relevant . Or you can have fun or pun enjambment as Amsawtell just illustrated above .  Generally speaking, however, speculating about or trying to work with enjambment in standard prose formatting is not very productive at all.
.


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## RHPeat (Dec 14, 2016)

Clark's right. 

Prose is already enjambed for the most part. but a mixture might actually work. Part of what enjambment does to poetry is speed up the text at the end of the line; this shortens the line breath pause in versification. It also empowers the head of the following line in cadence. 

Prose on the other hand doesn't need enjambment because it has forward motion in the text reading from line to line due to sentence structure and punctuation. There are no versification breath pauses in prose; which poetry has. So prose naturally flows forward reading from line to line in the text. 

Enjambment is a poetic device. But if you mixed prose and poetry like a haibun structure with a free verse instead of a haiku within the form's structure; you could enjamb the poem part to flow more like the prose that has been written. 

Understand that versification itself is a meter due to breath pauses at the end of the line. Just like cadence is an irregular meter within the internal line, hitting the accents inside the line. But language itself has rhythm due to cadence. Each language has its own unique cadences. Those rhythms can be imitated as accents. 

In poetry enjambment draws lines closer together; thus speeding up the lines or stanzas within a poem. It also tends to put a noun near the head of the following line which empowers the head of the next line with an accented word. This is why the device is used in poetry. It can not only smooth out the flow, but it can also regulate it at different speeds within the complete poem (making the musical rhythms faster and slower), so that the lines don't all end stop with a heavy bang or thump on the end of the line. With rhyme meter and punctuation you can make the end of the line quite heavy, with an accent, a rhyme & a punctuation mark. That's a thud clunk on the end of every line. Enjambing a rhyme softens that out some. Enjambment is not a simple device at all it is very complex due to what it does in poetry. 

a poet friend
RH Peat


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## EmmaSohan (Dec 14, 2016)

clark said:


> Generally speaking, however, speculating about or trying to work with enjambment in standard prose formatting is not very productive at all.



He put his hand under her blouse -- she gasped -- and touched her soft skin.
He put his hand under her blouse and touched -- she gasped -- her soft skin.

Obviously, that's not enjambment. But there's a break, and it makes a difference where that break goes. I like the second a lot more than the first, and the principles of enjambment could get me there. (The first is kind of the way Stephen King wrote his line: _He runs his hands up her smooth sides -- she gives a tiny jump at his initial touch -- and beneath the inside-out shirt.)

_And most of my short stories include a sentence broken up by a new paragraph, requiring me to decide where to break the sentence.

But right, I had to work hard to find any relevance of this lesson to prose, but I did, and I'm happy I read about enjambment and practiced it and thought about it.


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## Ariel (Dec 14, 2016)

You bring a unique perspective, Emma.


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## RHPeat (Dec 14, 2016)

Emma

In prose an interjection is set off by commas or dashes. Maybe even a colon to separate the sentence in a different way. Or the use of a period and the beginning of a new sentence to introduce the new thought. Your second example: sounds like she is gulping at her own skin. That she gasps her skin. It is more like a misplaced moderator as a fragment. It doesn't read too smoothly at all. Which is the opposite reason enjambment is used in poetry. Enjambment in poetry is used to smooth out the flow because of the bump that is already there due to the line break. 

If you want such abrupt things in prose try an exclamation point. It will create the abruptness and then you can continue the flow of the next sentences or paragraph. What might work better in prose is actual white space on the page. It would cause the break in the written context of presentation. It could make story lines very long however. But the mixture of poetry and prose is not new at all, and that could be done as well. Then there is poetic prose as well. A good example would be Melville's "angels and sharks scene" on the deck with the crewmen and the cook. It's a very long metaphor about good and evil. But it is extremely poetic. And it flows as text in the story line of the novel. 

a poet friend
RH Peat


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## Ariel (Dec 15, 2016)

From Strunk and White's _Elements of Style_:



> Use a dash to set off an abrupt break or interruption and to announce a long appositive or summary. A dash is a mark of separation stronger than a comma, less formal than a colon, and more relaxed than parentheses . . . Use a dash only when a more common mark of punctuation seems inadequate.



I have the fourth edition copyrighted in 2000.

We now return to talking about enjambment.

RHPeat and Clark, have either of you heard of end-stopped lines being referred to as "cloture?"  The only reference I have of it is in Lewis Turco's "The Book of Forms."  The definition for cloture that I found does not reference poetry at all and states that cloture is "a procedure of ending a debate and taking a vote."


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## RHPeat (Dec 16, 2016)

Ams

That's a new one on me. I will look through some of my reference texts and see what I can find. And you say you found that in Turco. I'll check my Turco It might be a different addition than yours. 

OK, this is how I read it: *Cloture* is the full stop at the end of a couplet or stanza unit. So it concerns a group of lines like a stanza that ends all the complexities of a thought in the last line. So if it is not the end of the stanza or the poem, what continues will be something new within the poem's overall thought. There are certain places in a poem where this definitely tend to happen.

*1.* At the end of the opening to the poem/ body of thought in the poem. Why so?
*2.* Because it is the beginning of the turning point/ shift in the poem, or climax. Which should show a new thought introduced into the poem.  
*3.* The beginning of the closure, which is a thought that combines the turn or shift and opening into a completely new thought as a revelation of sorts to show a change of some kind in the overall theme of the poem. 
*4.* And at the end of the closure — ending the poem. That too is an abrupt end to all the thoughts of the poem. 

Those places would definitely bring about *cloture*.
What it affects is the literary form. Which is pretty basic in poetry as 3 parts — opening, turning point, & closure. You have to have these parts to maintain a reader and draw them into the text of the poem. It's similar to the novel which has parts too. But they are far more complicated, with far more parts to it.  So this is a term for these abrupt places within the poem where the text tends to have full stops. 

So the last line of a group of lines or couplet will end-stop the thought and forward progression in the poem for some reason in the overall presentation. 

a poet friend
RH Peat

p.s. Thanx for teaching me something new. This kind of Cloture is used in some forms; like the Ghuzal where each couple is suppose to be able to stand on its own as well as read with the complete poem. It is sometimes referred to as the string of pearls because the couples can stand on their own. 

ron.


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## clark (Dec 16, 2016)

A bit of fun. . . .

What's that on the road ahead?

What's _that _on the road ahead?

What's that _on _the road ahead?

What's that on the _road _ahead?

What's that on the roadooooa head?


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## RHPeat (Dec 16, 2016)

In Judson Jerome's "Poet's Handbook" he defines Cloture as the opposite of enjambment. Basically saying the cloture resolves tension while enjambment heightens tension. By combining the two you can create different kinds of emotions due to how the enjambment is broken (which you have talked about) and then how Cloture resolves that emotional context through an abrupt ending — end-stopping the thoughts in a stanza. 

a poet friend
RH Peat


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## Ariel (Dec 16, 2016)

Ok, so it is more than just end-stopping lines--it's ending the thought of line of reason that goes with that group of lines and moving to the next (related) part of it. 

So in Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 (my favorite)



> That time of year thou mayst in me behold
> When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
> Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
> Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
> ...




Cloture occurs at the end of line 12 as this is the start of his turn.  This is true in all Shakespearean sonnets (and sonnets in general).  I would say there's an argument for cloture at the end of lines four, six, eight, and ten.  At the end of each of these lines he introduces or even returns to another comparison or idea. Though he speaks of old age and the approach of death with his tree metaphor the idea isn't actually mentioned until line seven.


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## RHPeat (Dec 16, 2016)

Ams

Yes that's correct: ending a line of thought. Also realize there is a thing called partial cloture. 

The clotures on the end of rhyme scheme would be considered partial clotures. Which is yet another term; it you read more about it. They have an abruptness to them too, but they really don't end the total thought about autumn as death here in this poem; while the couplet at the end of the poem introduces "Love" as a completely new thought. Which is the actual closure on the poem. That's a complete Cloture. There is another complete cloture just before this line: 

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,

this is the beginning of the turning point in the poem. It introduces fire into the poem as something internal. (that's a major shift in the poem). So just before this line is another full Cloture. Cloture comes with a full stop of the combined thoughts in a specific theme. 

This actually shows the literary form of the sonnet. This particular cloture is sometimes called the volta of the sonnet, where the shift in intent takes place in the sonnet's text. 

All sonnets have this break. In the Petrarchan sonnet you usually find the volta after the octet. Generally speaking most poems have a turn about 3/4th the way through the poem. That's where climax occurs/the volta/ the shift/the turning point. (All names for the same thing). I think if you understand literary form your poems will be far stronger. But remember there are no definite answers out there. 

The climax is just the apex of any form of writing that carries an intent in emotion, reasoning, or thought, etc. It is there to shift the reader's mind into another gear for new content and contextual understanding. 

a poet friend
RH Peat


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## Ariel (Dec 16, 2016)

Thanks Ron.  I believe I understand.


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## RHPeat (Dec 16, 2016)

I don't at all. But I have a lot of fun nonetheless.


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## Ariel (Dec 16, 2016)

Well, the dictionary definition I found holds some answer for me. Cloture in poetry is when an argument ends--whether with a rhyme scheme, thought, or metaphor. It occurs when there is a new turn to the poem.


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