I'd stress what Jon Tan wrote: "My recommendation would be <p> for
stanzas and <br /> line breaks for most verse." Stanzas are usually
taught as the paragraph of poetry and verses are referred to as line
breaks.
Side note you're free to ignore: I'd argue most of the historical bits
below are incorrect in the details, but are correct in general.
Jonson's _English Grammar_ is a great snapshot of the period's grammar
eccentricities, but hardly a guide that was followed--he didn't care
enough to publish it while alive despite how careful he was about
publication (I did a Ph.D. one Shakespeare and taught medieval, early
modern and modern poetry for eight years before the siren call of web
work).
-jody
--
Jody Tate
Web Developer - UW Network Systems
http://staff.washington.edu/jtate/
On Jun 19, 2008, at 3:06 AM, Jon Tan wrote:
Historically each stanza in a poem is a paragraph. Layout (new
lines) began punctuating paragraphs in the later Middle Ages. Prior
to that the lines ran into one another with punctuation used to
indicate where breaths and breaks in the running text occurred [1].
Syntactic punctuation was not commonplace until after Ben Johnson's
English Grammar in 1640. That means that layout /is/ punctuation for
modern poetry, so markup needs to reflect that. My recommendation
would be <p> for stanzas and <br /> line breaks for most verse. To
do anything that returns stanzas to running text when CSS is
disabled would break the syntax of the verse /unless/ lines are
specifically punctuated with something other than a break at the
end; a comma for example. <pre> is an alternative but does not
punctuate line ends at all, except visually. It would be interesting
to know how alternative browsers handle both <br />s and single/
double line breaks in <pre> blocks. Do they inject a pause or other
aural boundary?
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