The second major exception to the lowercase rule is the literary device known as personification. In poetry, literature, and creative writing, authors often attribute human qualities to inanimate objects or abstract concepts. When a season is personified, it is treated as a proper noun and capitalized. For example, in a poem describing the harshness of the cold, a writer might pen, "Winter gripped the town in his icy fist." By giving Winter a gender and human agency, the writer turns the season into a character, thus necessitating capitalization. In standard expository writing, this is rarely applicable, but it is a crucial distinction for creative writers to understand.
June smiled and pulled an old, worn novel from her bag. It was a first edition of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . She opened it to a page and pointed: “Always winter but never Christmas.” is a season capitalized
The primary rule regarding the seasons is that they are common nouns, not proper nouns. Proper nouns refer to specific names of people, places, or things—such as "Monday," "January," or "France"—and are always capitalized. In contrast, common nouns refer to general items or concepts. Because the seasons are recurring, general periods of the year rather than specific named entities, they follow the standard rules for common nouns. Therefore, in the vast majority of contexts, the seasons should be written in lowercase. For example, in the sentence, "I enjoy hiking in the fall," the word "fall" is lowercase. Similarly, one would write, "The flowers bloom in spring," not "The flowers bloom in Spring." The second major exception to the lowercase rule
it is the first word of a sentence or part of a formal title. For example, in a poem describing the harshness
Recommends lowercase for seasons even when they are used to designate an issue of a journal (e.g., "the spring 2023 issue").