Capitalization of the first letter of the first word of any line of poetry went out, as I recall, in the 1960s. It was deemed artificial to come across a capital letter within a sentence, should the sentence carry over onto the next line. Modern poetry needed to look contemporary. That meant that it had to look as much like prose as possible. John Ashbery once told me the precise date that he eschewed capitalization, and I think it was in the late sixties. Poets who continue to capitalise the first letter of the line are often regarded as throw-backs and dismissed as old-fashioned, however innovative their writing may be.

I returned to capitalization in the mid-seventies, when I moved on from abstract writing to description without significance (as I saw it then) – since I felt that modernism concerned the absence of significant meaning as much as a deliberately abstract mode of writing. A poem I wrote in Australia exemplified this notion for me – influenced by a conceptual work in words by Richard Long – which simply listed the objects in his line of sight. I decided to write a poem describing what I saw directly beyond my type-writer:

x

THE AGE OF THE STREET

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Here is the passing of an uneventful hour

In a backwater of the town, above a backwater of the bay

Behind the containers brought to this faraway shore.

Wall-to-wall carpet, sweet-smelling dust in the air,

The gloss of doors, each knob a scintilla of day,

Rackets and hats, glimpses of sash and pane

Through the blinds, flaws troubling the picture-plane:

Then lengths of railing, kerb and the grey camber

Levelling off into gutters lead the eye away

With the newsboy’s whistle as he tugs his trolley of papers

Up the shallow incline punctuated by some blooms.

An hour between darkness and light for overcast portions

Of changeable afternoons; monochrome, khaki and amber

Moments with no more definition than a reproduction

In the discarded volume: vacant chairs and rooms,

Reticent gardens, phones unanswered, pasted-over heaven,

Locked factory gates. The blinds obey the suction

Or suspension of the breeze, exhale or hold their breath in;

Blinds gathered up or closing jerkily to obliterate

The criss-cross canvas view permitted through a mosquito net

Gridding the surface – before, or exhausted after

A storm out of season, watched through the slits in Venetians.

A print smears the sheen of dust on an outer wing,

The texture of macadam alters, rain or shine,

As wobbly birds with a few feathers begin to sing

Wibbly-wobbly songs, and a weeping willow caresses

A Volkswagen in the otherwise uninhabited street.

Then a motorbike, or a girl casually shouldering tresses

Turns the corner, hardly in sight before gone

Past fronts incurious as to whether prompt or late.

Thinnish cloud, inconsequential wind, a sagging wire,

While a bit of colour is provided by the parked car.

Here, what’s on the air is just preferred a little softer:

Loud noise-makers are locked behind factory gates.

Different hours obtain for dogs than do for cats.

Across the bay there’s a stillness about the black lifter.

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Once, when transferring the text of this poem from one file to another, I lost the formatting. It proved easy to re-set because the first letter of each line was capitalized. And this is the crux of my argument for capitalization. In this computer age, formatting is vulnerable and it has become increasingly vulnerable with the advent of mobile phones with narrow screens. Many poems now just look like pieces of prose chopped up in some arbitrary way. If the formatting gets lost the poem proves difficult to reassemble. Capitalization mitigates this risk. Partly because of this risk though, lines may become more conventional; the line breaking very obviously at the end of a phrase or sentence. Thus non-capitalization pushes the poem towards the conventional, rather than away from it.

What does the line “mean” anyway? Why do we break our poems into lines? Basically, there is a slight pause before we move onto the next line – and in traditional terms this is matched by the caesura, an even more subtle pause within the line – so that in pentameter you might get two feet/three feet (i.e. a pause after the second foot) or three feet/two feet (a pause after the third foot). The very last word of a line can be emphasized precisely because it is that last word. I enjoy adding a “What” to Thomas Edward Brown’s poem MY GARDEN:

A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!

Rose plot,

Fringed pool,

Ferned grot–

The veriest school

Of peace; and yet the fool

Contends that God is not—what,

Not God! in gardens! when the eve is cool?

Nay, but I have a sign;

‘Tis very sure God walks in mine.

As you can see, the added what gets hugely emphasized by its position as the final word in the line. What I am getting at is that if you want to emphasize a word for effect, it is good to break the line after that word. Capitalization of the first letter of the next line guarantees that you can restore that emphasis, should your poem’s formatting get lost, which, in this digital age it very well may.