In discussions of English poetry, it generally means not much more than a pause in the middle of a line, but acquires more significance where the pauses are managed according to some strategy, most notably by Alexander Pope. There, the displacement of the caesura from one line to the next introduces a kind of counterpoint that plays against the extreme regularity of the closed heroic couplet. In the verse of Milton's Paradise Lost, however, the caesura often seems to push one line forward into the next, increasing the intensity of enjambment. It does this in a quieter way in eighteenth century blank verse, producing a kind of informality that Wordsworth and Coleridge found agreeable in their conversational poems. In Old English poetry, the caesura is so pronounced as almost to create two lines in place of one. English hexameters often end up being divided in half by regular caesuras. Because they are symmetrical, tetrameters can be managed in the same way, a remarkable example being Yeats's "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death."
But because the use of the caesura in English differs according to the
time period, the poet, the meter, and even the individual poem, there will
be no attempt here to provide examples of its multifold functions.
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