In his sonnets, Shakespeare would use end-stops rigorously, with most lines ending in commas, semi-colons, and colons. Sometimes he relied on enjambment or exclamations, but as far as possible, he seemed to save his full stops for the very last line.
Take Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee…”: six commas, four semi-colons, two colons, one question mark, and one full stop.
Ezra Pound, on the other hand, would often refuse to use any end-stops at all.
Take these lines from Canto LII:
The empress offers cocoons to the Son of Heaven
Then goes the Sun into Gemini
Virgo in mid heaven at sunset
indigo must not be cut
No wood burnt into charcoal
gates are all open, no tax on the booths.
No commas, no colons or semi-colons, “midheaven” is split for emphasis or for pause. There’s as little punctuation as possible, down to “gates are all open, no tax on the booths.” That solitary comma functions almost as a speed bump near an intersection.
According to Daniel Albright, W.B. Yeats had ‘punctuational quirks’ which he was happy to leave to his editors to sort out. It was as if those technicalities were above or below the poet, who belonged to another realm of language.
T.S. Eliot, like his mentor Pound, would sometimes drop punctuation altogether, but then he would go and stick in a full stop just to confound the reader:
On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with Nothing
(“The Waste Land,” lines 300–302)
Most people read those lines as “On Margate Sands, / I can connect / Nothing with Nothing.” So why the full stop? Some say it’s to heighten the sense of isolation and fragmentation, but it actually spoils the drama rather than intensify it. “I can connect / Nothing with Nothing” is no longer restricted to this moment, here-and-now, on Margate Sands. It steals some of the bombast. Perhaps that was the point, who knows?
One thing that seems pretty clear is that punctuation plays by different—or fewer—rules in poetry.
In “Un Coup de Dés,” Mallarmé throws punctuation out the window almost entirely, relying on spaces and font size to convey the necessary pauses and emphases. Punctuation becomes visual and spatial, and all the more effective for it.
Compare that with Sylvia Plath, who was a heavy punctuator:
Clownlike, happiest on your hands,
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,
Gilled like a fish. A common-sense
Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode.
(Opening lines of “You’re”)
Apostrophes, hyphens, and commas in all the right places.
So, the question is: does punctuation really matter in poetry?
Perhaps it depends on whether it’s intended to be read aloud or read off the page. At a reading, intonation and cadence work magic that is sometimes hard to replicate in print, where that same impact disappears somewhere between too much and too little punctuation.
I suppose we’ve all got our own punctuational foibles. I often neglect end-stops. I know I shouldn’t, but putting in a comma, semi-colon or colon just feels wrong at the end of some lines. Not all, just some. I could not actually say why. It’s not a rational thing. It’s pure feeling.
So whether you’re partial to Elizabeth Bishop’s em-dashes or agree with Joyce that quotation marks “are an eyesore,” rules are strange visitors in poetry. You can choose whether to follow them, or which ones to follow, and no one can really complain—except the reader, who will have to read in all the end-stops and what-nots we choose to leave out.
Anthony Doyle is a founding member of Old Scratch Press. He is the author of the novel Hibernaculum and the recently-published Jonah’s Map of the Whale and Other Poems.
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