Enjambment: Definition and Examples

Enjambment takes place when a syntactic unit is broken up across two lines of poetry (Domínguez Caparrós, 2000).

This can trigger stylistic effects, such as emphasis on or contrast between the individual elements of the broken-up syntactic unit, or double interpretations for the enjambed lines.

The following example from Spanish poet Gloria Fuertes, for which García-Page (1991, p. 596) provided the analysis in the table below, illustrates the expressive possibilities of enjambment.

The adjective-prepositional complement structure across enjambed lines 2 and 3, desnuda // de amigo insincero, gives rise to a double interpretation:

• If we stop at the metrical pause, we'd interpret lines 1 and 2 as meaning I'd rather stay naked (without clothes).
• However, if we read the complete syntactic constituent desnuda // de amigo insincero, this conveys the meaning of naked in the sense of without or alone: without a fake friend.

Besides double interpretations like in the example above, the possible stylistic values of enjambment are an object of current research (see Martínez Cantón, 2011 for a review).

Gathering systematic evidence on this phenomenon, as we are doing with an automatic enjambment detection tool, will help assess current characterizations of enjambment, its formal definition and its stylistic values.