Giraffes
Capitalisation in poems
is a vexed
question. In modern poetry the first word in every line is not
necessarily
uppercase. Although it’s required for the first letter of new
sentences within
the poem (bar e. e. cummings). And, optionally when there is a line
break
mid-sentence, lowercase first-letters serve to demystify the meaning by
taking
the jolt out of the sentence’s flow. Alas, when I get a poem
published
sub-editors tend to regularise them to pre-modern ‘giraffes.
And even more
distressingly, many poets I love like Wallace Stevens, and respect like
Seamus
Heaney, insist on first-letter capitals for every line. It’s
a losing battle.
My word-processor routinely giraffes lowercase line-starts.As the German language giraffes internally in poetry, making the flow full of hop ups and neck stretches, I prefer to read it in translation. When struggling to read Rilke in German, capital letters in the middle of a sentence make me wince. My reaction must be put down to a cultural bias. I associate the giraffine of honest workhorse words with idealist philosophy (Lofty thoughts with nowhere to go except back to Themselves) and the worst excesses of German Romanticism (high stepping around the maypole). I know such capitalisation is an ancient linguistic convention, and who am I to lock antlers with the language of Goethe, and Georg Buchner. Still, such linguistic prejudices are a stumbling block to appreciating Rilke in his vernacular.