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Old 03-21-2008, 10:15 PM   #15
Taylor514ce
Actively passive.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DaleDe View Post
Line 6 and 7 are tricky since you want to pretend that 7 is connected to the end of 6. This can be done as a special case since it probably won't happen too often in a poem but it is possible to build a CSS for this too.
Dale,

I've been a web developer since the web's creation; I know CSS. Yes, CSS can supply the necessary formatting.

However, it's not I who want to "pretend" that line 6 and 7 are in fact a single metrical line. The poet quite definitely and intentionally wrote the poem that way, and it is far, far from uncommon. As I've labored to stress, what we could call "white space" is integral to many poems.

Many poems, if styled/formatted with CSS, wouldn't be able to use CSS classes at all, but would rather require line-by-line formatting.

As an extreme example, there is an entire class of poetry called "concrete poetry" that relies almost entirely on typography and white space management.

I didn't mean to start a flame war, only to caution would-be "e-poetry formatters" against casually altering the layout of a poem. Those line breaks mean something.

A few examples for those interested, in which jagged, irregular seeming spacing is intentional and in fact critical to understanding the poem:

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World, Richard Wilbur
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, Wordsworth
Ode to the Confederate Dead, Allan Tate
Paterson, William Carlos Williams (in fact, most of WCW's work)


Code:
Her
     hips were narrow, her
                                     legs
thin and straight She stopped
me in my tracks - until I saw
her
      disappear in the crowd

Last edited by Taylor514ce; 03-21-2008 at 10:30 PM.
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