Thanks, especially for the examples.
I was at a workshop on Tuesday. One experienced poet said that if he has a long poem that he wants to enter in a competition, he just removes alternate line-breaks. Another experienced poet said that he'd never considered that possibility, but might do so from now on.
Like Carol, I suspect some line-breaks. It seems to me that some people try to add as many line-breaks as possible to emphasise as many words as possible, and offer greater chances for extra meanings. Currently adding line-breaks seems to offer more potential gains than losses.
Re Tim M's Was this a desire on the part of the scribe to conserve precious sheep-skin? Probably - yes. From "The Written Poem", Rosemary Huisman, Cassell, 1998 -
* p.108 - "Conventions associated with lineation appears to have emerged originally from the economic needs of the book-trade in Alexandria ... First the size of the rolls was standardised so that they were easier to transport. Later the lines contained in the columns of prose writing in any one roll were made almost equal in length. ... By this standard length, payment of the scribe and the price of the book were fixed."
* p.1 - "Old English text is written continuously across the page, filling the valuable vellum from left to right margin"
* p.20 - "colour ... in early Middle English texts is sometimes used to mark the beginning of a metrical unit in texts without lineation"
* p.101 - "the practise [of lineation in English poetry] is clearly not established for late Old English poetry in the mid-eleventh century and that it is well established, especially for socially valued reproductions of texts, by the end of the fourteenth century."
* p.114 - "The practice of bracketing lines in various ways to indicate rhyme schemes is also frequently encountered in manuscripts with the dominant one verse per line layout"
* p.25 - "The interrelating of sound pattern and visual line is so well established that modern poetry, even when without traditional metrical regularity or rhyme scheme, may encourage us to read in a certain way according to the line breaks."
And the power of line-breaks probably wasn't unknown to grave-stone etchers or billboarders/advertisers even centuries ago.
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