Do we need line breaks?

[brynmawr1]

I think one of the more compelling reasons line breaks are important in poetry is they give the writer the ability to say two things, often unrelated, within one grammatical sentence that would not require a comma or other punctuation. This can also give the reader a little surprise when the next line continues in an unexpected direction.

a related question which Busker raised is "What makes a paragraph a prose poem vs just plain old prose?"