For most verse texts, lines are grouped into stanzas or verse paragraphs. In the previous chapter I argued that the division of a text into lines and the location of line boundaries holds only by implicature. In this chapter I argue the same for the organisation of lines into line-groups and the location of line-group boundaries. Organisation into stanzas or other groupings of lines is an implied form of the text, and not an observer-independent fact of the text.

Line-grouping is implied

In this section I undertake a detailed analysis of three texts to show that linegrouping is implied. I begin with a poem in which line-grouping is implied both by layout and by other means; then a poem in which layout tells us that there is no line-grouping but there is other evidence which tells us that there is; I conclude the section by looking at a poem in which there are simultaneous but contradictory line-groupings.

Line-grouping is unambiguously implied by layout and other means