Enjambment is when a sentence or phrase in poetry runs over from one line to the next without a pause.
Enjambment, from the French enjamber ('to stride over'), is the technique of letting a syntactic unit cross a line break instead of stopping at it. The opposite is the end-stopped line, which closes neatly with punctuation. Milton's 'Paradise Lost' built its grand momentum from enjambment — clauses tumble across the blank-verse lines, refusing the heroic couplet's tidy resolution. Wordsworth used it to mimic the wandering of thought; the modernists made it a structural principle, with William Carlos Williams breaking lines to create deliberate hesitation. In contemporary poetry, where rhyme and metre are often abandoned, the line break itself becomes the chief expressive tool, and enjambment is how poets hold a reader's attention across that white space — by making the silence at the line's end into a small interruption rather than a full stop.