Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. Drib
Issybird may wish to expand upon this.
The scansion of a line of poetry (the metrical rhythm of the line) can sometimes be compromised due to the width of the screen size on an individual ereader.
To put it another way: A line of poetry may have to be shortened due to the screen realities of the individual ebook reader that one owns, which means that a 'long' line may have to drop to the next line (when no line break occurs in the original poem), which can impact upon the look as well as the reading and appearance of the original line. This can compromise the beauty and the meaning of some poems.
Some of these issues can be 'overcome' if one makes the print tiny.
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Exactly.
There are minor additional issues, but they’re more of a quibble. Poems that follow one on another on the same page, compounding the problem of a poem that overruns lines or page. And, the loss of the physical and psychological limitation of one slender book of poetry, as opposed to an omnibus, whether real or virtual. Poems take time. A thin volume with a limited number of poems as discrete entities encourages one to slow down, to savor, to examine the lines and what the poet is doing with language and meaning. You don’t want to bang through poems.