W.S. Graham is clearly a poet influenced by Wordsworth's way with lines. In Book XIII of the 1805 Prelude, the poet contemplates the sea of mist surrounding Snowdon, in particular a breach in the sea through which the sound of rushing water can be heard:

Wordsworth, as Christopher Ricks has shown, is the principal innovator after Milton in the use of line-break white space. Here Wordsworth tropes the space to figure a sublime breathing-place full of roaring voice. For Graham, the white space was a ‘welcome-roaring threshold’, where the voices of poet and reader both ‘go down / Roaring between the lines’.When we roar together, our voices become animal, natural like the seas and rivers, but also echoing with resounding sounds. Hearing Graham's roaring white space echo with Wordsworth's ‘roaring with one voice’, our own voice resounds within the threshold of the line-break, as though accompanied by many voices.

I have preferred the term ‘line-break’ to ‘line-ending’ mainly because it more closely suits Graham's modernist technique. Modernist poets who write free or accentual verse, in that they discard the metrical regularities that had policed the line for ear and eye, will be more likely to deploy the endings of their lines as breaks. As James Scully observes, in his ‘Line Break’, modernist and postmodern free verse consciously breaks sentences: ‘the sentence has been broken to release meaning’. What I hope to demonstrate, however, is that in Graham's work the line-break is used as a means towards the imagining of measures of continuity between modernist and Romantic practices, by sensing ways in which the break can at the same time work as a move across the difficult air of the ‘curious necessary space’ beyond and between the lines.

Line-breaks in free verse are a contested issue, for it has been impossible to work out whether something like significant enjambement occurs in the form. It is complicated by its prehistory in the French Symbolist tradition. Clive Scott's extraordinary monograph on vers libre argues that the shift from liberated verse to free verse after the death of Hugo had nothing to do with increased attention to enjambement.