[Clive Watkins]

A marginal question, no doubt…. What feelings do people have about the competing conventions of capitalizing or not capitalizing the initial letter of a line of verse? (I think the issue has arisen at Eratosphere from time to time, most recently in connexion with ChrisW's amusing "My Reflection Talks Back".)

Clive Watkins

[A. E. Stallings]

I don't mind either way--but for my own work I prefer the convention of caps. Actually, most of the younger formalists do, oddly enough... If you're going to be formal, why be "neo" about it? (such is my logic, anyway.) Older folks as diverse as John Ashbery and Richard Wilbur also keep with the tradition. But I think most people now are used to seeing the "miniscules", and get a bit flustered at the sight of caps. Generally, you raise fewer eyebrows by going with prose rules of caps.

[Roger Slater]

I think maybe it depends on such things as whether the verse is dominated by enjambment, and, if so, what kind of enjambment. For example, if a line is to begin with just one word that's been enjambed from the previous line, and then there's a period, it might not sit well with me if it is capitalized.

Also, if there are lots of stops (periods, semis, etc.) within the lines, it may be jarring to have "extra" capital letters among the interrupted clauses.

But on the whole, either way works for me.


[This message has been edited by Roger Slater (edited January 31, 2002).]

[ChrisW]

I notice that the issue tends to come up when the grammar flows on without pause across lines. In this case, Carol raised the objection primarily with respect to the most thoroughly enjambed stanza in my poem.
I personally like the capitals, but I suppose the more verse impersonates prose, the more disruptive or self-conscious the caps look.
(BTW, thanks for calling it amusing, Clive.)

[Now I look like I'm just copying Roger -- we cross-posted.]

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited January 31, 2002).]

[Richard Wakefield]

I used to use initial caps, and I still kind of like the look of them. However, I quit using them after a session with a group of college students who claimed to find them awkward, stilted. Yes, yes, we can say I caved in to the quasi-literacy that is symptomatic of our general decline, etc. But these were smart, engaged kids who were making a real effort to appreciate my work and who were very interested in the nuts and bolts of formal verse. It seemed to me that if times had changed enough so that what really amounts to an arbitrary convention was keeping them out, or impeding their entry, at least, then why not adapt? I don't use "'tis" and "evr'y," no "thee" or "thou," after all, and those are actual SOUNDS. Initial caps don't even make any noise -- they just sit there on the page.
Now I have a plan to write a sonnet with no lineation at all and submit it around as a prose poem...
RPW

[Alan Sullivan]

I'm with Richard, more or less. I used initial caps for seven years, then purged them. I don't miss them at all. They can create quite a fusty clutter, especially when there are formal names nearby. And they obtrude most notably on short-line verse. That's perhaps the principal reason why Tim Murphy has eschewed initial caps for three decades. The informality of uncapitalized lines also appealed to his youthful egalitarianism. Very likely Richard's contemporary students feel the same way. Tim and I are drawn to formal poetry by its music, not its appearance.

A.S.

[graywyvern]

i go back & forth. there is one mode i never capitalize,
& that's the unpunctuated free verse poem a la Mallarme &
Merwin. i guess i capitalize the first letter of every
line in periods when i'm feeling particularly archaic.
then i do so even in free verse poems.

[Robert J. Clawson]

[quote]Originally posted by Richard Wakefield:

"Initial caps don't even make any noise -- they just sit there on the page."

Yes, they're visuals. But in the work of great poets, they're invisible. Frost used them, but I didn't even notice that until about five years ago.

I think that they indicate that the poet feels that the line is primary and is under perfect control. They're vulnerable to looking mannered or pretentious if the lines aren't gems.

Bob

[ginger]

One place I've noticed, as a reader, that I don't care for them is following lines that could be read as enjambed or not. It's jarring to read what feels like a complete clause or phrase, think I'm taking up a new one in the next line only to find that the new line doesn't really go anywhere on its own, but needs to be connected back to the previous one.

I don't want to pick on Chris, because I love his poem, but these lines do that to me:

Of the light doomed to serve you as you pass
Judgment on your nose, your eyes, your ass)--

In my crit, I said I thought it was a clever line break, and I still do, but I don't care for the capital J.

Ginger

[Carol Taylor]

I ditched the initial capitals three years ago. It is no longer a persuasive convention, and I find it somewhat stilted. When everybody used them, I didn't notice them. Now that I'm spoiled to not seeing them, they irk me.

Years ago women wore hats and gloves to luncheons, teas, church, and in the military community, to changes of command. Eventually the convention gave way, and we all stopped wearing them to luncheons, teas, and church. I was glad, because I looked like Minnie Pearl or Ruth Buzzy in them. I got down to one hat, my "change of command" hat. I can remember the feeling of freedom I experienced the first time I decided not to wear it and lightening didn't strike me dead. I was the only woman there without a hat, but since my husband was CO, I was in the unique position of being able to please myself. On his outbound C of C, nobody wore a hat. Conventions change.

The point is, unless there is a logical purpose for it, a convention is just a convention. Somebody started it and somebody can change it. Everybody has to decide his own comfort level.

I am a stickler for punctuation and grammar, because clarity depends on them. But initial line capitals are an imposed convention that in contemporary poetry we must make allowances for and read around. They impede communication in the way Ginger just described, forcing the reader to go back and start again. Contemporary poetry uses a lot of enjambment. Initial capitals date back to a time when thoughts and phrases were contained in the line. The more enjambment we use, the less sense it makes to throw stumbling blocks to that enjambment in the readers' path.

Carol