"[3] A monostich could be also titled; due to the brevity of the form, the title is invariably as important a part of the poem as the verse itself:[4] Some one line poems have "the characteristics of not exceeding one line of a normal page, to be read as one unbroken line without forced pauses or the poetics of caesura", and others have "a rhythm, (as with one-line haiku), dividing easily into three phrases".
[5] Modern monostich was started in Russia in 1894[6] when Valery Bryusov published this apparently absurdist single line: Perhaps the first to reintroduce one-line poems was Guillaume Apollinaire with his "Chantre" (1914)[7] in his collection Alcools (1913), mentioned by Leroy Breunig in 'Apollinaire and the monostich' followed by Bill Zavatsky with his 'Roy Rogers' article (1974)[8] in which he made clear that one line poems are not at all foreign to Western poetic tradition, also including therein some from Jerome Rothenberg's 'Technicians of the Sacred' (1969),[9] all of which are referenced in William Higginson's 'Characteristics of monostichs'.
[10] Another French poet, Emmanuel Lochac, published one-line poems in 1920 under the title Monostiches.
[11] However, as Dmitry Kuzmin has pointed out in the first book-length study of one-line poetry (2016), Walt Whitman included a monostich (though a very long line) in an 1860 edition of his Leaves of Grass; and in 1893 and 1894 Edith Thomas, possibly in collaboration with an amateur author Samuel R. Elliott (1836—1909), anonymously published several one-line poems intended as a joke in The Atlantic Monthly.
[12] In the 1920s one-line poetry was rediscovered in the US by Yvor Winters, Edwin Ford Piper, Charles Reznikoff and others.