Language is central to homo sapiens and in literature is used in a special way to investigate the human condition. In poetry language is even more special and particular poets employ it in a highly individual fashion. ‘Style’ is the term that describes this individual use of language by a writer and style by definition implies choice: from a wide, indeed infinite number of sentences available in the language he uses, the writer selects particular sentences which best express what he wants to say. And in poetry he must also choose a particular metrical pattern into which he fits his sentences or else decide to write vers libre.
The writer's choice extends over numerous aspects of the finished work such as syntax, sound, vocabulary, metre and rhetorical figures like metaphor, metonymy and anaphora. In syntax the writer can use hypotactic or paratactic, long or short sentences and can alternate between the indicative and the subjunctive or optative moods; as regards sound he can make the words echo the sense; through his choice of vocabulary he can emphasize vital matters and adumbrate motifs central to his work; in his handling of metre the poet can use enjambment or end-stopped lines, vary the caesura and substitute long for short or vice versa; finally, the writer can employ the innumerable devices available to a self-conscious literary artist to add distinction and power to his work. A word of warning, however, Dylan Thomas rightly tells us that when all the technical aspects of a poem have been minutely analysed there is still something left that defies the scholar's annotating: the intangible, but ineluctable, impact of great poetry.