Literally, align describes the act of setting parts into order or matching them carefully. In poetry, it is useful when describing the fitting together of sound, rhythm, image, or argument. The term appears in craft-based poetic language because poems often depend on the deliberate alignment of parts to create balance, clarity, or emphasis.

Align is a spatial and structural craft term often discussed alongside enjambment, caesura, and visual form, since how words are aligned on the page can reinforce or complicate a poem's meaning; in concrete and visual poetry, alignment becomes a primary compositional tool, while in more traditional verse it often refers to the alignment of stresses, rhymes, or thematic threads across stanzas; students should note that alignment can be both formal, as in meter and rhyme, and thematic, as when a poet aligns two seemingly unrelated images to suggest an implicit comparison, a technique closely related to juxtaposition.