The Layout and Punctuation of Verse

The role of punctuation in verse is inextricably bound up with the functions of layout and the graphic manifestation of rhyme in the presentation of texts for readers. This complex of graphic features also reflects the different ways in which readers have perceived prosodic structures, and the interaction between these and other rhetorical and logical structures embodied in verse texts. At the most basic level a poem exhibits a rhythmic structure which in Latin poetry and most European vernacular poetry is based upon patterns of stichic verse. The presentation of verse on the pages of manuscripts surviving from late Antiquity seems to reflect accounts of verse found in the works of grammarians, who discussed its structure in terms of colon and period. In Antiquity scribes indicated rhythmic structure primarily by means of layout. Scribes responded to the presence of rhyme in different ways.

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