Really there isn't a solid answer to this. It mostly comes down to the poet's personal preference. For me it has always been capitalizing each line of poetry. I don't know if it's just what I'm used to when I'm typing (I tend to not capitalize each line when I write it by hand) or if it is because I'm heavily influenced by a more traditional style.
My thoughts are starting to change on this idea for two reasons. First, as I research lit magazines and journals, what is getting published most often are pieces that don't look or feel in any way like traditional poetry, including no capitalization and shorter lines. The second reason is that as I work on my poetry project, quite a few of my pieces look off when every line is capitalized. Once I switched it to lowercase, it looked much better. I still have the tendency to capitalize the first line, but that seems a lot less distracting than having every line do the same thing.
What are your thoughts on poetry capitalization? Does it matter, or is the choice to capitalize or not capitalize important to the poem's message?
1 comment:
I generally capitalize the first letter of each line, too, mostly because of habit than for any real reason. Then again, most of the poetry I do would be considered traditional. I'm not opposed to using all lower case or a mix, however. e.e. cummings was big when I started school and first started reading poetry.
Poems like this demonstrate the height of my skills.
There once was a poet quite frantic
Who submitted work to The Atlantic.
Nobody there cared
If the rhymes were quite rare -
Got rejected, though, as they're pedantic.
OK, it needs a little work. I don't think making it all lower case will help...
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