Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines.' James Longenbach opens The Art of the Poetic Line with that essential statement. Through a range of examples - from Shakespeare and Milton to Ashbery and Gluck - Longenbach describes the function of line in metered, rhymed, syllabic and free-verse poetry. That function is sonic, he argues, and our true experience of it can only be identified in relation to other elements in a poem. A vital new resource by one of America's most important critics and one of poetry's most engaging practitioners.'