• Coelacanth
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    5 days ago

    I don’t think there is any rule or pattern in modern poetry. Line breaks create interruptions as you’re reading which can be used to manipulate the flow of a poem, it can also be used to emphasize certain words or sentences or group them, or decouple them. Of course, a bad poet can always just arbitrarily introduce line breaks to make a piece more “poem-like”. You see that happen a lot, and the skill of the poet I suppose will determine whether it comes across as the former or latter.

    The extended spacing of the last line here works for me, I will say that. It really introduces a sense of pause, which goes really well with the theme of the poem and that last line.