Hyperbaton

Hyperbaton (Greek 'stepping over') names the deliberate displacement of a word from the place syntax would ordinarily put it. In English the neutral order for a simple sentence is subject–verb–object; hyperbaton fronts the object ('This I must see'), delays the subject ('Into the room walked the general'), or otherwise disturbs the sequence for emphasis, rhythm, or surprise.

Highly inflected languages — Latin, Greek, Russian — permit hyperbaton freely because word endings, not word order, carry the grammatical relations. English cannot go as far, but poets and orators have always exploited the room it does allow. Milton is the great English exponent: 'Him the Almighty Power / Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky' opens Paradise Lost with a fronted pronoun that keeps the reader off-balance for two lines.

The figure is closely related to anastrophe, which is really just the smallest kind of hyperbaton — the inversion of two adjacent words. Both trade a small loss of naturalness for a gain in emphasis; both punish overuse, because after a page the reader stops feeling the displacement as a signal and starts feeling it as mannerism.

Common mistake: using hyperbaton so aggressively that the sentence becomes hard to parse. The figure works because the reader briefly notices the displaced word; if the whole sentence is displaced, there is no baseline for the reader to notice against, and the emphasis dissolves into noise.