SOURCE: “Wright's ‘On a Phrase from Southern Ohio,”’ in The Explicator, Vol. 55, No. 2, Winter, 1997, pp. 100-2.

In the following essay, Cooper analyzes the significance of line length in Wright's “On a Phrase from Southern Ohio.”

Poets and critics disagree about the role of the line in free verse. Some assume that there is a pause at the end of each line whereas others do not; some say lines within a poem tend to take the same amount of time to read or say, yet others disagree. Some critics assume that line divisions should reflect divisions in syntactic phrasing; others argue that the most important feature of free verse rhythm is the tension created by enjambment, in which line divisions and phrase divisions do not match. Some assume that the structure of lines in a poem has a specific, iconic meaning, whereas others see no more meaning than the...