Capitals and verse breaks

[sheenaghpugh]

This is in response to vilakins's question in the comments on the previous post.

First, caps. In present-day poetry, there are several possible conventions: some poets capitalise the first letter of every line and some don't. Many use capitals where prose would, i.e. to start a sentence or for proper names, and some few, of course, follow the e.e. cummings line and don't use them at all.

The caps-on-the-first-letter-of-a-line brigade are generally held to be traditionalists (or dinosaurs, depending on your camp) but it's by no means clear to me how old this tradition is. It isn't obvious in mediaeval manuscripts; possibly it came in with printing, but those authorities who say it has "historically" been the custom don't say when exactly in history they mean. But the "modern" tradition of capitalising by the rules of prose did, I think, come in (or back in) with free verse. Without the formalities of rhyme and metre, the capital first letter convention looks artificial - indeed to me, it looks so even on formal contemporary verse.

Next, vilakins was saying "I am also sometimes puzzled about breaks between verses in some poems, often within sentences or thoughts". Well now, I ain't no expert on prosody, but as far as I know, epic poetry, like Homer's, intended to be recited, didn't have a verse structure. It was narrative; it had regular metred lines, which acted as an aid to memory before the days of writing, but it moved from one thing to the next as a story does.

Verse structure was the preserve of lyric poetry, and certainly in ancient times, this was meant to be sung. Whether the music was composed before the words or after, a tune, at least in western music, is a repeated pattern of notes, again I'd guess for reasons of memorability, and lyric poems - songs - presumably fall into verses to match that pattern. Indeed it's a habit of folk song, from mediaeval to modern times, that new words are constantly fitted to recycled old tunes, sometimes with odd results - the tune to which we sing "Ilkley Moor" is said to have been written for the carol "While shepherds watched", and the humorous words written later. It does work with the carol if you repeat the third line once and the fourth twice, as a refrain. Indeed, verbal refrain, echoing the musical, is one of the clearest markers of lyric poetry,as is rhyme, and they both impel it toward the non-narrative verse structure of a repeating pattern.

Later came a divide between song and written lyric poetry; Keats and Shelley weren't supposing anyone was going to sing their odes. But by then the verse structure, presumably, served to organise the poet's thought; it does seem natural that each verse would be a separate unit of thought, though leading from the last and on to the next. And mostly they are, in the nineteenth century anyway. It must be very rare for either Keats or Shelley to end a verse on anything but a full stop (or equivalent). Browning, who even in strict form has a more conversational voice, sometimes does. His "Two in the Campagna" has a verse break on a comma. It's still on a sense break, in that the next verse begins a subordinate clause, but it's close to a run-on, and it may be no coincidence that he also uses run-on lines within verses more than they do - at least in narrative or conversational form poems like "My Last Duchess". But when he's being musical, as he also often is, his verses too are songlike and self-contained.

You'd think it might be free verse, again, that changed things, but I'm not sure it did. Whitman, though he mostly abandons rhyme, does still divide poems into verses and the verse breaks are also sense breaks. Carl Sandburg, another early American free-verse poet, is the same. Yet Humbert Wolfe, writing rhymed verse in the early 20th century, has "The Grey Squirrel":

Like a small grey
coffee-pot,
sits the squirrel.
He is not

all he should be,
kills by dozens
trees, and eats
his red-brown cousins.

The keeper on the
other hand,
who shot him, is
a Christian, and

loves his enemies,
which shows
the squirrel was not
one of those.

Now the break between verses 2 and 3 is clear, and you could argue that the one between 3 and 4, though in the middle of a sentence, also comes on a sense-break, but the one between 1 and 2 is pure run-on.

I don't know the date of writing of this poem, but Wolfe published one collection in 1916. I think, myself, that the Great War had a quite massive effect on the use of poetic form of all kinds; in a world where chaos reigned supreme, excessive striving after order in words must have looked a mite artificial. Not everyone stopped using rhyme and form, but most people started using it more loosely - eg Owen with his half-rhymes and pararhymes instead of full rhymes. It's after this, I think, that you more often find run-on verse breaks (as well as line breaks, but I'll do a separate post on them).

But this is just my take on it, and I'm no expert; in fact I have never studied poetry as such. I just write and read a lot of it for fun...

Comments

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Thank you! That's a lot more than I expected. :-) I asked about the leading capitals because most poetry I see posted on LJ has them. I much prefer normal punctuation.

I love that squirrel poem, and am amazed that breaks within sentences were used that long ago. I think it works well, as the break is every four lines, so it seems to be more for looks. I've encountered more modern ones with no rhyme or regular beat (for what of a better term) where the breaks just seem random. Is the visual aspect--how the poem looks on a page--a consideration? I know from the magazine work that I did--and my own experience--that short paragraphs are much more inviting.

[sheenaghpugh]

Is the visual aspect--how the poem looks on a page--a consideration?

Very much so. White space is as much a visual part of a poem as the black lead is part of a stained-glass window.

But this is where there can be some dispute between trad and modern, hinging on the traditional left-hand justification of poems, unless there is some obvious reason to do otherwise (eg it's a shape poem). Many folk new to writing poems centre them for no good reason except that they think it looks nice. Most editors and publishers hate this practice because it looks amateurish. But some poets, while basically left-hand justifying, also like to use the whole page, indenting lines rather than dropping them when they want a slightly different kind of break. Personally I like this, but I've encountered people who don't. A good example of someone who likes to use the whole page is Rosie Shepperd but ironically the one poem of hers I can find online doesn't do it!