Capitalizing the Start of a Line

[JohnBoddie]

The issue of capitalizing the start of a line or not has arisen frequently, with the practice of starting each line with a capital letter generating criticism in many cases.

I just went through about twenty books on my shelf to see if there was any "consensus" approach to this from respected modern poets.

The answer -

There is no "consensus." Some poets captialize the beginning of each line, others only where the beginning of a line is also the beginning of a sentence, and others only for the first letter in the poem.

The preference seems to be for capitalizing where the start of the line is also be start of a sentence.

One thing that is obvious is consistency. Once the decision is made to capitalize or not capitalize, the poet does not vary the approach.

The sample I looked at covered everything from W.S. Merwin (who doesn't like punctuation either) to the formal poetry of Rhina Espaillat.

The question I pose is:

For critique offerend in pffa, does it make sense to identify the capitalization of each line as a weakness?

I think the answer is "no."

JB

[This message has been edited by JohnBoddie (edited 04-09-2001).]

[nyeldell]

JB-

This is certainly an issue worth mention. I would have to agree with you that a poem should not be judged as lesser than another because of line-beginning capitalization, but I also feel that when a beginning poet does this, it deserves mention. I am certainly not one to judge, being a beginning poet myself, but I would have to guess that the majority of beginning poets' goal in doing this would be to make a poem look "poetic".

While this practice is certainly not to be frowned upon, as it is purely opinion, I do think that it is worth mentioning that a poem will be perfectly fine with normal punctuation. Of course, I think it should be made clear that it is not "wrong", but a choice of the poet. I try to make that clear if I mention this in a crit, but I am sure I fall short at times.

Of course, if an aspiring poet becomes serious, they will begin to read more and more contemporary poetry and will come to these conclusions on their own.

Just my opinion...

Nathan :-)

[Kemmer]

I would say that capitalizing the first word of each line is neither a weakness nor a strength. However, capitalization should be a deliberate choice dictated by the material. A poem in a conversational voice about a night at the drag races will probably not be helped by capitalization. A philosophical poem about leaving the priesthood might demand formal presentation.

I think choosing to capitalize first words should be done the same way one chooses whether to use rhyme, regular meter, alliteration, repetition or any other poetic device. Does it help the poem?

Kemmer


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Life is not a zero-sum game.

[This message has been edited by Kemmer (edited 04-10-2001).]

[kas]

To answer John's question:
No, it doesn't.

I look for consistency only. Sometimes I might say that I prefer capitalizing the start of a line only if it is a new sentence, and this is true, but there is certainly no rule.

For some reason, many critics at PFFA have come to beleive that capitalizing the start of each line is old-fashioned and/or archaic. This isn't true. The decision lies only in the preference of the author.

I admit though, that I do not like the way the capitalization of each line looks on the page. To me, it seems to lend importance to words that don't need it.

kas.

Kemmer: Well said.

[This message has been edited by kas (edited 04-10-2001).]

[clive]

Is it MS Word that does this as a matter of course? Maybe that's why so many poems on these boards end up looking that way. I don't generally capitalise, but I don't really care if other people do or not, and don't believe it's a valid point of criticism. I just don't think it matters one little bit. Paul Durcan writes conversational free verse with capitals at the beginning of every line. Sophie Hannah writes formal verse, mostly without capitalisation.

Clive

[&*(9)%46#$&]

Publications (of any merit) be they books,
periodicals,or e-zines follow what is known
as a "house style"-which basically covers such style matters as whether or not each
first line of a poem should be capitalized
or not. If the publication you are submitting your work to prints "first-lined
capitalized poems-then it would propably be
a good idea that your poems are presented in this
manner.

If you don't then the editor may reject your
work on the basis that you are an unknown amateur who hasn't take the time to carefully study the publication before submitting your work.


[This message has been edited by &*(9)%46#$& (edited 04-10-2001).]


[This message has been edited by &*(9)%46#$& (edited 04-10-2001).]

[JohnBoddie]

Re: "Is it MS Word that does this as a matter of course?"

Capitalizing the first letter of a sentence is a default in MS Word and it can be changed by removing the check mark for capitalizing the first word in a sentence under the AutoFormat tab accessible through AutoText in the Insert menu.

JB

[Mandolin]

Although most people don't think about it, using initial caps or not depending on whether their favorite poets use them, I think capitalizing the first word of each line helps remind both the poet and any readers that the line is the fundamental unit of some particular poem. Since this isn't true of every poem (though I personally think it a weakness when not true), it isn't always appropriate. Aggressively enjambed poems, in particular, can be disrupted by initial caps, which is another way of saying the same thing: poetry which ignores the integrity of the line probably shouldn't use initial caps.

So my answer would be that there is no simple rule to apply, but that there are times when commenting on the use or lack of initial caps is helpful. I think I would like to see beginning poets use them more, since it might nudge them toward a clearer sense of the line.

And isn't Rhina Espaillat wonderful!


[This message has been edited by Mandolin (edited 04-10-2001).]

[Ralph T]

After discussing this with an English professor, I was told there was no real rule but that, traditionally, capitals were used at the begining of each line in rhyming verse and standard English punctuation should be used in free verse- capital at the begining of a sentence and period at the end.

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If you want to learn to sing, then sing.
If you want to learn to dance, then dance.
If you want to learn to write, then write.

[Kemmer]

Mandolin, are you saying enjambment works against lines? Sometimes aggressive (or at least thoughtful) enjambment is the result of perfect understanding of how lines work in poetry.

Seems to me it would be a pretty dull poem that consisted of a series of sentences running down the page, or of breaks only where one would normally pause in speech without consideration of the power of line-ending words.

What's "aggressive enjambment?"

Kemmer

[Donner]

Originally posted by Kemmer:
Mandolin, are you saying enjambment works against lines? Sometimes aggressive (or at least thoughtful) enjambment is the result of perfect understanding of how lines work in poetry.

Kemmer

I think Mandolin was saying that capitalizing the first word of a line works against enjambment, that it disregards the integrity of the line and wouldn't be appropriate in that case.

Donner

[Mandolin]

Donner's mostly right about what I meant, Kemmer, but if I'm reading her correctly, I'd disagree slightly with her last comment. Enjambment by itself works against perception of the line as a rhythmic unit (what I mean by its "integrity"), and initial caps by themselves work for such perception. When there's a lot of enjambment, initial caps are a distraction, breaking the forward push enjambment attempts to create. In this case, it's the poem's integrity that is compromised: the line has already been abandoned.

Whether you see that abandonment as a problem depends on what you want poems to do. If you look at English verse before the 20th century, you'll find only a few poets who enjamb a significant proportion of their lines. When there's no period or other punctuation at the end of the line, the line almost always ends after a complete syntactical unit. Even Milton, who would cheerfully break a line between a subject and its verb, or a verb and its direct object, would never end a line with an article, preposition, or conjunction, or break in the middle of an adverb-verb or adjective-noun pair, all of which have become common in contemporary poetry. For me, that's a problem.

[This message has been edited by Mandolin (edited 04-16-2001).]

[Julie]

Originally posted by Kemmer:

What's "aggressive enjambment?"


I'd use that term to describe enjambments that break an adjective/noun pair (and in the red/house), break on an article (and in the/red house), conjunction (and/in the red house), or prepositions at the start of a phrase (and in/the red house), or break a word (I HATE enjambment that breaks a word. HATE HATE HATE).

Julie

[Tony Smith]

Dear John,

I think capitalization, or lack thereof, is a nit. I've mentioned it in critiques before, but usually the piece begs to be ripped apart anyway, so I just go for it.

You know, hate this as you may (and garyg will), grammar, puncutation and captialization are added/deleted oftem for effect and freqeuntly used at random because someone saw someting somewhere and they liked it. Who wasn't influenced in some way by Cummings?

I think if the ONLY nit one can find in something is capitalization, then it's minor unless it truly detracts from the piece, as with enjambments (as previously mentioned).

Tony

PS (Sorry about the Dear John - I just couldn't resist!)

[Kemmer]

Mandolin, I generally agree with you.

"... would never end a line with an article, preposition, or conjunction,"
##I wouldn't call that "aggressive" enjambment, I'd just call it bad.

"...or break in the middle of an adverb-verb or adjective-noun pair,"
##Now this, on the other hand, can be a way to make the line work towards extending meaning. True, it breaks the "integrity" of the line, but it results from the poet intentionally using lines for effect, thus maintaining the importance of line in poetry. I don't know if caps help or hurt the intent. I've seen good line-breaks used both ways.

Kemmer

[Julie]

Originally posted by Kemmer:
Mandolin, I generally agree with you.

"... would never end a line with an article, preposition, or conjunction,"
##I wouldn't call that "aggressive" enjambment, I'd just call it bad.



I wouldn't go so far. I'm asking permission to post part of a poem from another board where the poet ends both a line *and* a stanza with the conjunction "and."

I didn't like it at first, but it's definitely growing on me.

Julie

[garyg]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Tony Smith:

You know, hate this as you may (and garyg will), grammar, puncutation and captialization are added/deleted oftem for effect and freqeuntly used at random because someone saw someting somewhere and they liked it.

**The operative word here is *random*. If someone is inventive as you describe for a reason, and that reason can somehow be deciphered, I don't have a problem with any form of experimentation. If someone plops down misspellings, awkward grammar and Wyrd cApiTalization in a seemingly random manner, how is the reader to know if it's a typo or not?

garyg

[Howard Miller]

As far as open form poetry goes, W. C. Williams fought and finally won the battle with Harriet Monroe over removing capitals at the beginning of each line. There's no question that uncapitalized line beginnings are perfectly appropriate in free verse, and lines are likely to be more confusing than not if capitalized there.

In closed forms, it seems to me to be less of an issue because it's traditional, and formalists frequently tend to hold to traditions. Personally, I punctuate sentences, not lines. Where I've seen line-beginning capitalizations be a problem has usually been in poems that already have an abundance of other problems, the most serious being a poem (e. g., a sonnet), that consists entirely of end-stopped lines where the initial capitalization simply reinforces the hard line-end break--for me, this creates a poem that has the rhythmic effect of riding a bicycle over railroad tracks, with a huge bump at the end of each line.

Howard

[Julie]

Here is the example I mentioned with a very aggressive enjambment on a conjunction (middle of a poem by wendy v):

"as though he knows I closet-smoke
and fell in love with sorrow and

he knows it never ends."

The break after "and" emphasizes a pause, and also emphasizes the finality of the "it never ends" line.

So I would consider this a successful enjambment.

Julie

[Tony Smith]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Julie:

"or break a word (I HATE enjambment that breaks a word. HATE HATE HATE)."

***So, this wouldn't work for you:

“The opened door drew pupils tight as sun
light pierced the smoke; the eight-ball disappeared.....”

Tony

[Kemmer]

You got me, Julie. I made flat statement implying "always," never a good idea when making an argument. There's probably a good use of "of" at the end of a line somewhere, too. My error. http://www.everypoet.com/poetry/poetry_forums/smile.gif

However, I still say that good enjambment respects the integrity of the line, and I'd bet the poet of your example thought long and hard about that "and" at the end of a stanza.

Kemmer