I’m looking at the two versions of of a poem I wrote, “Reach” (As of 10/18/2017, it’s still just sitting in a folder on my computer).
The first, what’s more natural to me at this point, separates lines into different grammatical parts. For instance, in the first stanza, I separate the three prepositional clauses into their own lines. I follow the same thing throughout the poem, actually. It’s all separated into different grammatical parts.
I have read poems that do not follow this method (some more than others), and it’s these that the second version emulates. They break sometimes in between grammatical units, like nouns and their modifiers, like prepositional clauses, etc. The effects seem to include natural forward motion, like stair steps or like the meter in Jabberwocky, and an emphasis on certain words or phrases that wouldn’t otherwise be noteworthy.
Here’s a couple for study:
This one seems to break each stanza into three lines regardless of what’s going on in the thought. At the same time, thoughts always end at the end of a stanza, even though a thought might take up more than one stanza. Each line is two to three words. So I can’t tell if she’s following the numbers or following one of the other purposes I mentioned before. Or something else I’m missing.
Garrett also sticks to a specific number of lines in each stanza, but he doesn’t seem to stick to a specific number of words in each line.
Perhaps I should read up on modern line breaks. There’s bound to be a reasoning I’m missing.