The Legacy of Form
Formal poetry typically includes the following features line-breaks - Most forms specify where these need to be. Making a virtue of necessity, poets discovered ways to exploit them, using enjambment, surprise, and varieties of end-rhyme. Rectangular stanzas - Most forms produce lines of near-equal length in stanzas of near-equal length, resulting in poems that are a series of blocks. Initial capitals - Early verse took from prose (especially religious texts) the idea of a complete thought per line, and with it, perhaps, the capitalizing convention. Also the capitals help to counter-balance the weight of the end-rhymes. The rise of free verse made the line-break a more flexible device. Numerous experimenters explored the potential of layout. Some poets used ragged-left as well as ragged-right formats - not as the Alexandrians, Herbert or Lewis Carroll did (making a shape on the page), nor to emphasise the rhyming pattern, but to guide meaning and control rhythm. At the same time ee...