Bergson's philosophy of duration (durée) — the continuous flow of time as opposed to its spatial representation as a series of discrete moments — has profoundly influenced modernist poetry, especially the stream-of-consciousness impulse and the poem's effort to capture the lived continuity of experience; In Whitman's long lines and enumerative structures, there is a philosophical assertion of continuity — the democratic self continuously expanding to include more experience, more people, more world; Tennyson's "In Memoriam," with its cyclical structure and return to seasonal continuity, enacts the philosophical consolation of natural continuity against the discontinuity of individual death; A poet writing about aging might use continuity as a philosophical concept — the question of whether the person one is at seventy is continuous with the child of seven, and what constitutes identity across radical temporal change; The enjambment in poetry — the continuation of a syntactic unit across line breaks — is a formal enactment of continuity, the sense of flow carrying across the interruption that the visual line break represents; Parfit's philosophy of personal identity, which challenges the idea of a continuous self, has influenced contemporary poets who fragment the lyric "I" across time, questioning whether continuity of consciousness is a philosophical reality or a comforting fiction