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
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