Line Breaks in Contemporary Poem

In some contemporary poems, the poets break the lines of their poems into two parts or more and write them down vertically or like stairs after each other. This technique, called line breaking, was invented by Mayakovski, the Russian contemporary poet. Afterward, some Persian poets imitated him, though not seriously, in their poems but it was applied extensively by Shamloo, about 1950, as a suggestive device in Persian poetry. There is no plan for breaking the lines but, through searching in the poetry by poets who have applied it. This paper is going to examine and describe where the line breaks occur in the poetry. The result of the study shows that there are three main types of line breaks: Some of the line breaks fall among the units of images to give poems a particular appearance and to create visual images. The second kind of them, occur prior to semantic or syntactic elements to create a series of emphases. The third group, are those which cause to foreground the musical aspects and to create rhyme and rhythmical innovations.