Line Lengths #1: How long should a Line be?

This article is for: Beginning and Intermediate poets

Lines are a vital part of poetry.

In fact, for most poems of the last 50-100 years, the lines are how you can tell that it is poetry instead of prose, since other giveaways like rhyme and meter have become less and less common.

(And yes, there are also prose poems, but they’re always in a minority.)

So, figuring out how lines work would seem to be pretty fundamental to figuring out how poetry works.

But lines are also one of the things that beginning poets find the hardest.

How on earth do you know when to end a line, if you’re not following a rule like counting syllables? Why do some poems use short lines, and other long ones, and others mix up short, long, and in-between? Why do we even have these things anyway?

Even for more experienced poets, there is always more to think about. Lines are, after all, one of our fundamental structural tools, along with sentences.

I’ve given some thoughts about line breaks in my eBook 8 Steps to Better Poems. But in this article, I’m going to give some thoughts about a different side of this fascinating topic:

How line lengths work in a poem, and how you might choose them.

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What does line length mean?

First lets cut a clear and simple path through the issue of how you might measure line length.

You see, you can measure the length of a line of poetry in English by one of several technical means:

The number of metrical feet it contains
The number of syllables it contains
The number of stresses it contains.

But for this article, I’m going to sidestep all of those, because I’m talking today about free verse, where those methods of counting, while potentially useful, are not essential. So if you’ve heard of things like trochaic hexameter or iambic trimeter and they give you migraines, don’t worry!

What I basically mean by line length is:

The physical length of the line as it appears on the page.

And of course, that also corresponds with the length of time it takes to say it or read it.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s move on to the useful stuff.

Four things that line lengths do in a poem

1. Line lengths have a big effect on rhythm and pace

Consider these two brief extracts from poems.

First, three lines from the “Footnote to Howl” by Allen Ginsberg:

Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!

The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!

The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!

Next, four lines from “Peace” by Adrienne Rich:

And the birds go mad

potted by grapeshot

while the sun shines

in one quarter of heaven.

Ignoring the content of these two extracts, I hope you can feel and hear that they move completely differently:

The Ginsberg lines unspool in a rush of energy and joy, ideas coming at you rapidly and densely.

The Rich lines proceed in a stately, measured way. Each line invites us to pause at its end, to absorb the mini-image that it contains before we see what the next line has to add to it.

This contrast in pace and flow has a lot to do with the lengths of the lines.

You can’t, for example, attribute it to punctuation, since the Rich lines actually contain less punctuation than the Ginsberg, which you’d think would speed it up—but no!

What we see here is that in the Rich, every time we hit the end of a line, we pause. Naturally, this slows the poem up. In the Ginsberg, the line breaks happen so much less often, so the torrent of words gets held up less.

In other words, shorter lines tend to slow a poem down.

Now this isn’t always true: it does also depend on where exactly you place line breaks. (If you break lines in the middle of phrases—enjambment—you will usually speed things up.) But it is a good rule of thumb.

So if you want a smoother, faster-flowing poem, try longer lines. If you want broken and staccato, try shorter.

2. Line lengths influence how the poem’s language operates

One thing about line lengths is so plainly true, that it might seem not worth saying: you can fit more words into a longer line.

Thank you, Sherlock Holmes. Moving right along…

No, wait! There’s a more interesting consequence of that obvious fact:

When you use long lines, you must keep the writing varied and interesting within each line
When you use shorter lines, you can let the line breaks make the language work.

To explain what I mean, here are two lines from "Ghazal: Say" by Sarala Estruch (ghazals usually have long lines):

You pull me close. In the garden beside the alley in which we crouch,

the chestnut trees are whispering, a sound only half got out. Sorry, you say.

Notice how much there is within each of these two long lines to keep you hooked.

Each line contains two separate sentences, each of which moves the narrative forward in a different way, so there’s a lot of story-based information to keep you interested. The sentences also vary greatly in length—short, long, short. The short sentences are very plain and direct in language, while the long one includes the personification of the trees whispering; and this image is elaborated and enriched by “a sound only half got out.”

Contrast that with the lines from the Rich poem:

And the birds go mad

potted by grapeshot

while the sun shines

in one quarter of heaven.

None of these lines has anything like the varied texture and dynamics of the ghazal lines—all are pretty downright and muted, except for the image of “one quarter of heaven,” which takes 4 lines to arrive!

What Rich is relying on here is the way her short lines snap the sentence up and make us pay extra attention to what each of them adds to the picture she’s painting.

And this is always something that short lines do.

Neither of these approaches is “better” than the other—they both have their merits.

What matters for you is working out which of these approaches may suit different topics, different poems, or different moods, and being flexible about trying them out.

3. Line lengths can shape expectations and surprise

Stephen Dobyns, in his book Best Words, Best Order, says that poetry is all about repetition and surprise. He means that as poets we use various kinds of repetition to tell our readers what to expect, and then—if we want to—we can break those patterns in order to create surprise.

I don’t know that I agree with Dobyns that this is all of how poetry works, but he’s certainly identified something important. And line length can be a good way to create both the pattern and the surprise.

At the start of a poem, the reader is waiting to find out what they should expect from your poem. If the first few lines are all roughly the same length—whether long, short, or somewhere in between—then you will set up an expectation that this is “the” line length for this poem.

So after that, you have the opportunity to create a surprise, or at least a change, by bringing in a different line length.

Here is Amy Crutchfield doing it in “A Clean House”:

Cleaning up dog vomit, I wonder

if I really am a dog lover.

A lover of anything. The vomit

an improbable brown found only in hand knits or

in the kingdom of fungi.

It’s grounding.

Here, the first three lines set up an approximate expected line length, but then Crutchfield mixes things up—twice, in fact. First, with the longer fourth line, which seems suddenly to expand beyond the calm containment of lines 1-3—perhaps to mimic a swelling of nausea in the speaker? Then again in the short last line, after a return to the “expected” line length in the fifth line. This time the change seems to express finality, a dour acceptance of her disgusting predicament!

One more example, from “Freely Espousing” by James Schuyler. Most of this poem has wildly varying line lengths, as shown in these two consecutive lines:

“she is a pill”

on the other hand I am not going to espouse any short stories in which lawn mowers clack

So readers learn to expect this kind of roller-coaster. Then at the end, Schuyler suddenly does this:

Their scallop shell of quiet

is the S.S. United States.

It is not so quiet and they

are a medium-size couple who

when they fold each other up

well, thrill. That’s their story.

Six lines all the same length! These bring calm and balance to the ending, as well as being a “turn” in the poem.

So, switching back and forth between line lengths inside the same poem can be very powerful, and is well worth experimenting with.

4. Line length can be part of your creative process

Finally, what can lines do for you, as well as for your poem?

I think they can help you quite a lot with the messy business of making the poem.

A former teacher of mine, David Blair, used to talk a lot about poems “finding their line length.” According to him, when you figure out the right dominant line length for the poem, the poem starts to really function. Before then, it stutters.

I think there’s something in this. While I am happy to vary my line lengths in a poem, I do find that:

It’s helpful to get a feeling for how long most of the lines want to be.

Once you have that idea, then the line length you’ve fixed on becomes a guide through the maze of writing. You may not know exactly what each line ought to say, but at least you know how long it ought to be! And this helps you make decisions about what to omit or add. If you’re short of words, you know you need to intensify the language of a line (like Estruch in her ghazal) to extend it. If the line’s too long, you know to winnow out unnecessary descriptors or ideas.

And if a poem isn’t working at all, you can try stretching or compressing that dominant line length, to see how it changes the voice, the rhythm, and the pace.

Next Steps: trying out line lengths

Here’s an exercise to give you a practical experience of the power of changing line lengths

Pick a topic and do a long-ish freewrite on it.
If you need a topic to begin with, use “Storms.”
This freewrite will be your source material for the poems you’re going to draft.
Take a piece of blank letter paper and turn it sideways, into landscape layout.
In other words, so the paper is wider than it is long.
Draft a poem, using the full width of the page for each line.
This will compel you to use very long lines—up to 20 words or maybe more, depending on how large your handwriting is.
Try to let the long lines influence how you write. For example:
—Let the sentences stretch out luxuriously
—Repeat yourself if you like
—Put in lots of “voice” and conversation
—Make the speaker think and rethink themselves as they go.
Cut a piece of blank letter paper into 4 strips, lengthwise.
Each piece will be about 2 inches (5 cm) wide.
On these short strips, draft another poem on the same topic.
This time, the size of the paper compels you to use very short lines.
Again, let the line length influence how you write. For example:
—Be terser, more direct
—Don’t repeat
—Use fewer adjectives
Don’t write the same words as in the first poem: let the new line length create a different draft.
Make a third version with mixed lines.
Read both drafts, and decide which parts of both work best.
Then create a new version, that incorporates element of both drafts.
So, some lines are longer, and some are shorter. But you can also edit the lines from their first versions.

Have fun, and see what you get!