In part one of this discussion of poetic presentation, I examined the effects of punctuation on meaning, but layout's just as influential in creating or eliminating ambiguity, and our basic tools are line breaks, stanza breaks, indentation and capitalisation. But please remember – the following are not rules – they're principles that have been found to work by generations of poets whose poetry has endured. So while they're not mandatory, there could be some value in considering them.

Let's start with line breaks. It's here that prose and poetry diverge most, as prose makes much less use of line breaks for effect (as opposed to just filling the page) than poetry can. Traditionally, their primary use for effect in prose has been to delineate statements of direct speech, as in:

He came in and sat down looking tired, picked up a magazine and chucked it down again without opening it.

'What's up?' she asked.

'Nothing really,' he replied.

They had a cup of tea, which made him feel better.

 whereas in poetry line breaks can be constrained by factors such as metrical structure, rhythm or the need for emphasis of specific words (a key use of enjambment); or even used for weak segmentation of ideas. But there's a caveat – if the reader's not to be mentally brought up short, all these uses have to relate to meaning. Line breaks that appear arbitrary to the reader disrupt the flow of comprehension. If, for example, a line break in the middle of an idea forces an insignificant word to the start of a line, the message is weakened unless some obvious aspect of form or structure strongly justifies the break. But even then, it might not be the optimum choice – what about re-arranging the words so a significant word follows the break? This is the essence of successful enjambment, as in:

[...] When Duncan is asleep, –

Whereto the rather shall his day's hard journey

Soundly invite him, [...] 1

 where the significant word soundly is emphasised by starting a new line. If, instead of the implied split infinitive, the third line had read invite him soundly, the required emphasis (the likely soundness of Duncan's sleep, making the proposed murder easier) would not have been achieved. So word order and line breaks interact and (at least at the stage of fine tuning) should be considered together.

Weak line breaking within ideas is particularly a problem in unstructured verse as there is little or no 'external' framework to fall back on for clarification of where optimum breaks should be. For example, I've frequently encountered loosely structured poems with each line a mere two or three words long, the frequent breaks occurring irrespective of meaning. It can be very hard work for the reader to extract the message from such poems, as the presentation dominates, causing the left (analytical) brain to take command. So to avoid confusing the reader, except in the case of free verse the basic principle is that line breaks should have a recognisable purpose in support of meaning or strongly identifiable structure. And in the case of free verse, line breaks should have a recognisable purpose in support of meaning, so they should not artificially create any arbitrary pseudo-structure by their spurious prevalence or apparent regularity, particularly not one that actively contradicts semantic emphasis.

Stanza breaks – generally indicated by a blank line – are next up for consideration. A stanza is in principle equivalent for the reader of a poem to a paragraph in prose. From Italian for a room, a stanza is a container for a concept. A stanza may include more than one idea but to avoid confusing the reader all ideas within a stanza should be both complete in themselves and congruous with the stanza's concept. A currently common habit of inserting a blank line in the middle of a concept (or indeed at worst in the middle of an idea or even a sentence) doesn't make it a stanza break – it just leads to confusion. I've recently seen many poems where, for example, every third line is blank but the text's meaning flows across said blank lines without any concomitant grammatical, semantic or conceptual breaks. The distraction of such layout from the message of the words makes me give up on such poems even if they're attempting to convey some important message. Once again, the arbitrary presentation obtrudes itself at the expense of the message.

Indentation of text generally implies a hierarchy of emphasis as in bullet points – key points, sub-points, sub-sub-points and so on. It's more useful in this sense for business presentations than for poetry because it generally requires supplementary explanation (a solid left brain activity) for its significance to be fully understood. However, used with care, it can also have another entirely non-hierarchical use – to create powerful emphasis in conjunction with the specific words used and the context. For example, Walter de la Mare's poem The Others starts with:

 'Friendly?'

 'Perhaps!'

 'Say, neutral?'

 'How to tell?'

 which (for me at least) implies mental pauses between the lines, creating a staccato tension that sets the stage for the poem's description of a creepy seance. But (once again) indentation must serve a clear purpose for the reader in relation to the meaning and/or structure of the poem – it must have an actual relevant effect on their response to the poem's content. If it doesn't – if it just seems arbitrary (as in the use of randomly varying indentation on different lines) it's merely a distraction, as the reader's left brain will start dissecting our intent as to layout rather than allowing their right brain to absorb the message of our poem. So indentation should be used with extreme caution and clarity as to its purpose, with the overriding caveat that it only works on paper or screen. Indentation is entirely lost when a poem is read aloud, so relying on it interferes with live transmission of our message.

My final inroad into presentation here is capitalisation. This is probably the most widely discussed and disputed aspect of poetic presentation, and it's not been, or is it likely to be, finally resolved. There are three schools of thought – [1] capitalise the first word of each sentence, proper nouns and (probably less relevantly for us poets) acronyms and some abbreviations but nothing else; [2] capitalise the first word of every line regardless of whether it starts a sentence; and [3] capitalise nothing at all à la e.e.cummings. The first is the long-standing convention for prose, the second the long-standing one for poetry until quite recently, and the third was a reaction against tradition for its own sake.

Originally, in the European tradition there were only capital letters. Minuscules (later, the printer's lower case) emerged around the 8th century CE and from then on selective capitalisation started to be used in manuscripts.2 But systematic capitalisation within body text according to nominally standard rules really emerged (primarily as a printers' convenience) once printing with loose type was introduced in the late 1400s. If one's setting loose type line by line rather than inscribing or engraving an entire page (the totality of what's so far completed being visible at a glance) it's easy to lose one's place in a block of text. Introducing capital letters at the start of sentences provided visual cues that helped avoid compositors' errors. It's persisted, largely I suspect, because it was also found to provide visual clues to the reader that helped her too, in finding her way around the text. But capitalisation of the first word of every line in poetry, apart from potentially assisting the compositor, has never served any functional purpose other than to declare 'look, this is a poem!' It's a purely arbitrary convention, which might in principle even impede understanding somewhat as we've been primarily conditioned to assume a capital starts a sentence and thus a new idea. However that doesn't seem to have seriously interfered with the appreciation of poetry from Chaucer in print onward, so it's probably not that significant.

Abandoning capitalisation entirely is quite another matter though. It seriously interferes with swift visualisation of semantic structure and thus impedes interpretation for the reader. It would seem to have no logical justification but to be driven by mere desire to be 'original' (succumbing to fashion yet again, until of course everyone's doing it, when it's no longer 'original').

I rounded off part one with the following, but it's so important I'll repeat it. It may be noted that throughout this note I've repeatedly stressed for the reader, and that's really the key issue. Durable poetry is poetry that gets read by successive generations of people, and it gets read by them because they like it, not because it's hard work to engage with. So of course anyone is at liberty to ignore any of the points made here, derived though they are from study of a long tradition of successful literature, which has relied for that success on empirical understanding of how the reader's brain works. But the question will then be whether as a result, the reader of their poetry will receive the message they intended to transmit with ease or has to struggle for it (or may indeed give up trying).

 [1] Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7: Lady Macbeth speaks

 [2] The Cotton MS of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the British Museum collection (probably prior to 1400 CE) uses capitals only at the start of pages, some but not all major sections and a few apparently arbitrary places, but not of individual sentences.