The very fact of a poem is theatrical. I think it insists on being said-in an examination of any aspect of poetry, and it bears directly, as I mean to show, on the study of the line. Poetry, like all art, is ritual, and ritual doesn't want conversation. The poet balances the two demands, plays conversationally against form, and finds in this tension much of the energy that means life to a poem. Some of the most effective means of holding this balance, of heightening the sense of ritual or increasing the sense of spontaneity, are discovered in the way the lines end.
Enjambment increases the sense of the lyric and compromises the ritualistic effect of rhyme.
The romantic poets returned to the practice as an important aspect of their release from the formal strictures of the poetry of their recent past. The French, German, and Spanish histories have not been much different. No matter how purely accentual a line may be until the end, it is in the nature of the language that the last syllables in the line are going to be recognizable and that the reader is going to hear them as accented or not. This is the same thing as saying that the reader will recognize the terminal foot. The poet has to take this into account or lose some control over what the poem is doing.