Quote:
Originally Posted by Taylor514ce
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
|
Yes, I agree there are classes of poetry that do defy using any form of formatting. I think those are best like some mathematical equations you just create an image and go with it. However, I didn't believe that was what the original author was talking about however I have been wrong before.
By the way, there is always worst case items that defy description but if we only designed everything for the worst case then we couldn't do anything. I couldn't even make a eBook out of Alice in Wonderland since there is this tail (tale) in there that defies formatting. (I ended up with a <pre> on that one to make it work. I do not believe that poetry cannot be on an eBook device but I do think you have to be more creative than just saying it can't be done.
Dale