Restored Lines: A Model Finds the Poet’s Hardest Line Breaks and Declines to Write Them

A line break is the smallest unit of poetic decision. Nothing in the sentence so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens requires anyone to break it after wheel. Williams did that. We strip the line breaks from 2,059 public-domain poems, grade every break by how much dependency structure it severs, and ask Claude Opus 5 to put the breaks back. We expected the model to recover breaks that follow the syntax and to miss the ones that fight it. On free verse, with rhyme, metre and line-initial capitalisation removed, and on poems the model cannot name, it recovers 70% of the breaks that strand a determiner or a conjunction from its host, where a grammar-and-line-length solver recovers 0%. Asked to write free verse of its own, matched to each human poem on subject and length, the same model produces those breaks at 6.1% against the human 12.3%. It locates the poet's override of the sentence and does not perform one. We read that gap as a dissociation between recognising creative agency and exercising it, and argue it makes the model a better instrument for reading poems than a collaborator in writing them.