A periodic sentence is a stylistic device

Stylistic device

In literature and writing, Stylistic Elements are the use of any of a variety of techniques to give an auxiliary meaning, idea, or feeling to the literal or written.- Figurative language :...

 employed at the sentence level, characterized as a sentence that is not grammatically complete until the final clause or phrase.

Characteristics

The periodic sentence emphasizes its important point by putting first all subordinate clauses and other modifiers

Grammatical modifier

In grammar, a modifier is an optional element in phrase structure or clause structure; the removal of the modifier typically doesn't affect the grammaticality of the sentence....

 to its main idea. The sentence unfolds gradually, so that the thought contained in the subject

Subject (grammar)

The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...

/verb

Verb

A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...

 group becomes available only at the sentence's end. Obviously artificial, it is used mostly in what in oratory

Oratory

Oratory is a type of public speaking.Oratory may also refer to:* Oratory , a power metal band* Oratory , a place of worship* a religious order such as** Oratory of Saint Philip Neri ** Oratory of Jesus...

 is called the grand style.

It is the opposite of the loose sentence

Loose sentence

A loose sentence is a type of sentence in which the main idea is elaborated by the successive addition of modifying clauses or phrases.-Effect:...

, also continuous or running style, where the subject and verb are introduced at the beginning of the sentence. Periodic sentences often rely on hypotaxis

Hypotaxis

Hypotaxis is the grammatical arrangement of functionally similar but "unequal" constructs , i.e., constructs playing an unequal role in a sentence....

, whereas running sentences are typified by parataxis

Parataxis

Parataxis is a literary technique, in writing or speaking, that favors short, simple sentences, with the use of coordinating rather than subordinating conjunctions...

.

Cicero

Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.He introduced the Romans to the chief...

 is generally considered to be the master of the periodic sentence.

Decline

In English literature the decline of the periodic sentence's popularity goes hand in hand with the development toward a less formal style, which some authors date to the beginning of the Romantic period, specifically the 1798 publication of the Lyrical Ballads

Lyrical Ballads

Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature...

, and the prevalence in twentieth-century literature of spoken language over written language. In American literature, scholars note the explicit rejection by Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...

 of the formal style of his time, of which the periodic sentence was characteristic; in his journal, Thoreau criticized those sentences as the "weak and flowing periods of the politician and scholar."

Rhetorical and literary usage

According to William Harmon

William Harmon

William Harmon is James Gordon Hanes Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of five books of poetry and editor of A Handbook to Literature. His most recent poetry has appeared in Blink and Light.- Life :William Harmon was born in Concord,...

, the periodic sentence is used "to arouse interest and curiosity, to hold an idea in suspense before its final revelation." In the words of William Minto

William Minto

William Minto , Scottish man of letters, was born at Auchintoul, Aberdeenshire.He was educated at the University of Aberdeen, and spent a year at Merton College, Oxford...

, "the effect...is to keep the mind in a state of uniform or increasing tension until the dénouement."

In his Handbook to Literature, Harmon offers an early example in American literature found in Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline...

’s "Snowflakes":

Out of the bosom of the Air,

Out of the cloud-folds of her garment shaken,

Over the woodlands brown and bare,

Over the harvest-fields forsaken,

Silent and soft, and slow,

Descends the snow.

Starting with a succession of parallel adverbial phrases ("Out of the bosom," "Out of the cloud-folds," "Over the woodlands," "Over the harvest-fields"), each followed by parallel modification ("of the air," "of her garment shaken," "brown and bare," "forsaken,"), the sentence is left grammatically incomplete until the subject

Subject (grammar)

The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...

/verb

Verb

A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...

 group "Descends the snow". Other American examples cited include the opening lines of William Cullen Bryant

William Cullen Bryant

William Cullen Bryant was an American romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post.-Youth and education:...

's "A Forest Hymn

A Forest Hymn

A Forest Hymn is an 1824 poem written by William Cullen Bryant, which has been called one of Bryant's best poems, and "one of the best nature poems of that age." It first appeared in The United States Literary Gazette and was published in Boston, alongside several other poems written by...

" and lines 9-16 of his "Thanatopsis

Thanatopsis

"Thanatopsis" is a poem by the American poet William Cullen Bryant.-Overview:The title is from the Greek thanatos and -opsis ; it has often been translated as "Meditation upon Death"...

". A particularly long example is the opening stanza (lines 1-22) of Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman

Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...

's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

"Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" is a poem by Walt Whitman, published in Whitman's Leaves of Grass collection. "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" is found in the title section, Sea-Drift. It was originally called 'A child's Reminiscence' and was published individually by the New York...

."

A "now-famous periodic sentence" occurs in Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist and novelist.Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism...

's short story "The Overcoat

The Overcoat

"The Overcoat" is the title of a short story by Ukrainian-born Russian author Nikolai Gogol, published in 1842. The story and its author have had great influence on Russian literature, thus spawning Fyodor Dostoyevsky's famous quote: "We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'." The story has been...

":

Even at those hours when the gray Petersburg sky is completely overcast and the whole population of clerks have dined and eaten their fill, each as best he can, according to the salary he receives and his personal tastes; when they are all resting after the scratching of pens and bustle of the office, their own necessary work and other people's, and all the tasks that an overzealous man voluntarily sets himself even beyond what is necessary; when the clerks are hastening to devote what is left of their time to pleasure; some more enterprising are flying to the theater, others to the street to spend their leisure staring at women's hats, some to spend the evening paying compliments to some attractive girl, the star of a little official circle, while some—and this is the most frequent of all—go simply to a fellow clerk's apartment on the third or fourth story, two little rooms with a hall or a kitchen, with some pretensions to style, with a lamp or some such article that has cost many sacrifices of dinners and excursions—at the time when all the clerks are scattered about the apartments of their friends, playing a stormy game of whist, sipping tea out of glasses, eating cheap biscuits, sucking in smoke from long pipes, telling, as the cards are dealt, some scandal that has floated down from higher circles, a pleasure which the Russian do never by any possibility deny himself, or, when there is nothing better to talk about, repeating the everlasting anecdote of the commanding officer who was told that the tail had been cut off the horse on the Falconet monument—in short, even when everyone, was eagerly seeking entertainment, Akaky Akakievich did not indulge in any amusement.