At the end of his Nobel Acceptance Speech, Seamus Heaney returns to Yeats' "The Stare's Nest by My Window":
"Poetic form is both the ship and the anchor. It is at once a buoyancy and a holding, allowing for the simultaneous gratification of whatever is centrifugal and centripetal in mind and body...The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all about..."
I think this dovetails very nicely with the Larkin and Dickinson example. A line or stanza break does not necessarily cordon off ideas so much as it serves as a vehicle for the reader's understanding of the piece. "In lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself" (Heaney). In aspiring towards their subjects, both Larkin and Dickinson sought the success of this belief, where the structure provides the reader with both an aural grounding and a jumping-off point. In either case, to simply confine stanzas to premises of a poetic syllogism or to ignore matters of sense entirely in stanza breaks is to lose sight of "the ring of truth" to which form is so integral in poetry.
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