rhyme made me do it

Another insipid turn of phrase brought forth by making a rhyme.

fire-starters

Always surprised to find ready kindling in the notebook. A few phrases, an odd sentence or two, and in no time at all a fire is built.

attractive sentences

Attracted by a good sentence, it was hard for her to enjoy lines broken into single words and disconnected phrases and clauses.

sound architecture

One very often finds that in a Moore poem every phrase is load-bearing. This is sound architecture, the weight brilliantly distributed.

—Maureen N. McLane, “My Marianne Moore,” My Poets (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012)

bigger than that

A theme that couldn’t be reduced to a single word or a short phrase.

phrasally compounded

Phrases, rather than clauses, must be the units of expression. This was Blake’s mode of choice in most of his work, from The French Revolution through Jerusalem.

[…] Sentences were more phrasally compounded, less clausally complex than ever before or since. Nouns and adjectives, in natural consequence, strongly dominated verbs and took over verb meanings. Sounds, like sentences, stressed not limits, periods, bounds, and conclusions as regular feet, line forms, rhymes, and stanzas would do, but rather interior units and correspondences, in echo and onomatopoeia. Reference stressed the objects and qualities of such sensory concern, the scenes, atmospheres, and feelings which could be onomatopoetized, the natural and human items of emotional description with their minor and parallel actions of observation and acceptance.

We may think Blake as too active, rebellious, and eccentric to use such material; yet we find it basically his. What additions he made to it were…not so much changes as extensions of the basic material. He increased the characteristic reference to color, scope, and feeling; he increased human anatomizing, scenic atmosphere, and passive and expressive verbs. He used a fuller load of substantives and descriptive declaration, and a freer play of interior sound. He liked what he had, and carried it further in its own realm.

—Josephine Miles, Eras and Modes In English Poetry (U. of California Press, 1957)

a large undertaking

For the poet phrasemaking is tantamount to the tomb-making of the Pharaohs of Egypt.

jackstraws

Revision: like in the game of jackstraws, if a single phrase is taken rashly from the construct of the poem, the whole structure of the piece collapses into loose straw.