I’ve deliberately made the title provocative, and I don’t believe it 100%. Further, I know this is a personal view not shared by many others. But it’s come to me lately, when reading the Norton Anthology of Poetry that I keep by my bedside, that the poems that speak to me, that move me, are nearly always ones that have rhymes. Now they don’t have to have a rigid ABABCDCD. . . GG structure of a Shakespearian sonnet, nor does every line have to rhyme, but nearly every poem that I love has some rhyme, internal or not.
I suppose I feel this way because poetry, as distinct from a lot of prose (but not all) is supposed to be musical, and part of that musicality is rhyme, which adds a pleasing musical tenor to the work. The same goes for assonance and alliteration, which I guess haven’t yet gone out of style like rhyme has. For if there’s one trait that characterizes truly modern poetry, it’s a lack of rhyme, or even rhythm. (Yes, I know some current poets still use rhyme, but it’s not frequent.)
When I realized this the other day, I tried to think of more modern poets I like who didn’t use rhyme. I already remembered that Yeats and T. S. Eliot used it, though the latter more sparingly in works like “The Waste Land”. (The last stanza of “Ben Bulben”, by Yeats, also has no rhymes save for the implied rhymes of there/near and spot/cut; but the rest of the poem does.)
Dylan Thomas also used rhyme most of the time, though in some of his poems, like the lovely “Fern Hill”, the lack of rhyme is compensated by a surfeit of alliteration and the sheer musicality of the words themselves (Richard Burton’s recitation is much better than Thomas’s own).
There are exceptions. I like Seamus Heaney, but his rhymes are few. So are they in Wallace Stevens, one of my favorite modern poets, but they are there nonetheless. Although “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is rhymeless, another favorite, “Peter Quince at the Clavier” has sporadic rhymes that buttress the work. Ezra Pound used rhyme early in his career, but it’s absent in my favorite of his works, his translations of Old English and Japanese poems, including the gorgeous “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”. His Cantos, which start off well but go downhill, are sans rhyme.
Still, a poem I discovered in the last few years, and one that, to me, ranks amongst the great works of our era—Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy“—is full of rhyme, mostly with the “oo” sound. And that rhyme is part of the reason it’s such a good poem.
What leaves me cold are rhymeless and music-less poems—the kind you see in The New Yorker, and which seem to comprise much of modern poetry. I can’t say that that kind of poetry is bad, because of course taste is subjective, but it doesn’t engage me. Nor will I aver that poetry has declined as an art form (though I maintain that both jazz and classical music have). But I will say that when I go back to read poetry, I tend to land somewhere between Shakespeare and Plath—avoiding at all costs Walt Whitman, Bill Clinton be damned.
Dare I say that the poetry of our era is concerned less with music than with thought? (Remember, I’m not an English teacher here, just a reader.)
Poetry must rhyme.
If it doesn’t, what is it?
Just a dumb haiku.
Very good!
Well played. 🙂
Good one!
After “limerick” the term “haiku” came to mind – and here it is!
Being a professional poet — i.e. a songwriter — myself, I’d agree that a poem should have at least *meter*, if not necessarily rhyme. I’d recommend Stephen Vincent Benet’s novel-length poem about the Civil War, “John Brown’s Body”. You’ll find every form and structure of poetry in that tome, and yes, all of it sings, even though not all of it rhymes.
I almost got PCC(E) a poetry book-and-celebrity-reading for Coynezaa this year – it is a collection by John Lithgow called Poets’ Corner and it emphasizes how important it is to read the poems out loud or to hear them – the sounds of the voices are important too – so rhyme, naturally, combines with the voice to express the ideas. Consider Morgan Freeman reading We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks.
So I agree that rhyme isn’t just for kids, it is for everyone to hear the sound of, like musical sounds.
I was actually going to post We Real Cool because it’s one of my favourite poems. A professor read it out loud and it sounded fantastic.
den Shovel.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.den Shovel.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
Morgan Freeman : https://youtu.be/o1W7VK6Yo4s
That also shows the cover of the book I mentioned.
I see it starts with Dover Beach. Ever since I read the parody, “Dover Bitch” I can’t listen to that poem in the same way.
If you like that, or if you’re a parent, you may appreciate Samuel L. Jackson’s reading of the poem “Go the f**k to sleep”.
Oh yeah I’ve heard his rendition. Pretty good.
Love that parody by Hecht! “and every now and then I bring her a bottle of Nuit d’ Amor” or some such! I’ve never heard anyone else reference that poem!
Oops – that’s the whole thing. Oh well.
I would also recommend “The Fire of Joy: Roughly 80 Poems to Get by Heart and Say Aloud,” published in 2020 and edited by the late Clive James. The selections stretch from the Renaissance to 2016 and mix classics with hidden gems.
Writing free verse is like playing tennis without the net.
—Robert Frost
I don’t think poetry necessarily has to rhyme, but there should be some kind of rhythmic structure. I took a couple of writing classes in high school and I always felt twitchy when we were told to write a poem. I wasn’t very good at rhyme or rhythm (I can’t dance to save my life) but I could string together a few good sentences with some vivid imagery, so I would just write some prose and break up the lines so it LOOKED like a poem. I got high grades, but I felt like a fraud.
Fixed it for you:
Wow! Bingo!
But put a space before the last two lines, like a coda.
Nice! 🙂
I agree, if it doesn’t rhyme or isn’t musical it’s prose not poetry.
The cow is of the bovine ilk;
One end is moo, the other, milk
– Ogden Nash
Informative, entertaining, amusing.
The codfish lays ten thousand eggs,
The homely hen lays one.
The codfish never cackles
To tell you what she’s done—
And so we scorn the codfish
While the humble hen we prize.
It only goes to show you
That it pays to advertise!
-Anon.
😀
Today I saw a little worm
Wriggling on his belly.
Perhaps he’d like to come inside
And see what’s on the Telly!
Spike Milligan
It strikes me that much current pop music is also more concerned with thought than music. At least there are a lot of words crammed into a lot of songs which I can’t see myself humming along to.
You don’t hum along with Sam Smith?
(Since I don’t understand Twitter, I typed this out.) Joseph Cosgrove tweet:
The discussion reminded me of a story about Brendan Behan. The writer was once invited to Oxford to take part in a debate about the difference between prose and poetry. His opponent spoke for almost two hours. Behan rose to his feet and promised to be brief. He recited an old Dublin rhyme.
There was a young fella named Rollocks
Who worked for Ferrier Pollocks.
As he walked on the strand
With a girl by the hand
The water came up to his ankles.
“That,” declared Behan, “is prose. But if the tide had been in it would have been poetry.”
There was a young fellow from Leeds
Who swallowed a packet of seeds.
Great tufts of grass
sprouted out from his arse
And his cock was all covered in weeds.
I tend to agree, but do not completely, and, in rebuttal, I submit Tennyson’s Ulysses:
And the rest. Perhaps it is that poets “are not now that strength which in old days, moved earth and heaven”.
And the ultra-magnificent conclusion:
‘Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are:
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’
As Proust said, “The tyranny of rhyme forces the poet into some of his finest lines.” Or something like that, anyway.
One of my favorite poems is “Song of the Chattahoochee” by Sidney Lanier. Don’t know how the poet could have given the image of the rippling water without rhyming.
I often complain about “poetry” which just looks like prose arranged bizarrely on the page. Then I read e e cummings…
As long as the word “Nantucket” does not appear, I prefer rhyme.
Is the name Regina OK to use?
Like many, I keep a collection of verse that moves me. (A good reason to follow 3 Quarks Daily is its poetry offerings curated by Jim Culleny.) I was going through that and realized that very little of what I like has rhyme. Hmm.
Rhyme and other intentional signposts of using sound in words is part of form used in prosody to identify it as prosody. Form in art is necessary for any two way communication to occur. A useful way to think of form in art is to think of it as the shared understanding of its grammar in order to understand the rules and then take a specific kind of journey… together. That’s how shared meaning is made, a new perspective, a means to touch upon or reveal something both meaningful and personal and important. It should be enriching interaction rather than some kind of ‘porn’ to evoke an arousal response.
So it makes as much sense to write poetry without a shared understanding of its form (or create any art without its necessary form to be mutually understood and then shared between audience and artist) as it does music without notes. It’s just noise, or at best an ‘artist’ yelling or shoving prose gibberish at you and calling it ‘poetry’ because it arouses in some way. It presumes that muddying the water of the art form is synonymous with creating depth. All it creates is confusion. Without form, one may as well tape a banana to a wall or fling paint at a canvas and call it ‘art’… oh… wait…
Nicely put – you have either thought about this before or studied the subject?
🤓
As Dom says: Very well said, thank you. This captures my thoughts on art.
Hence, I don’t get almost all modern art (post-cubism) and modern (orchestral) music.
(I’m going to quote you elsewhere, I hope that’s OK.)
I tend to agree, but not completely. People trying to create things that don’t conform to the norms of their media do nearly always result in failure, but such attempts are also where innovation comes from. The relatively few instances when it works is what gives us the richly varied arts that humans have created to date.
Also, I think there is plenty of room for beauty simply for beauty’s sake, and arousal simply for arousal’s sake. That too is communication and can be very powerful. A banana taped to a wall isn’t much of anything, not aesthetically, not emotionally and not conceptually.
Still, a good source of potassium. You can’t deny that!
And pretty tasty too, especially with peanut butter!
Try with brandy butter…
Blank verse is English poetry’s workhorse, both for lyric and narrative. Ex.: Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’
No rhythm, no rhyme, it ain’t poetry is my view. Some goodies: Tennyson, “In Memoriam”, “Locksley Hall.” Poe, “Ulalume,” “The Raven.” Robert Service, “Cremation of Sam McGee.” All 19th century, of course.
And all the better for it in my view.
Unless it’s meant to be humorous.
Can a parrot
Eat a carrot
Standing on its head
If I did that
My mum would send me
Straight upstairs to Bed
~~ Spike Milligan.
I think that a lot of modern poetry (as vs post-modernist poetry) combines music and thought in a very satisfying way. Look at e.g. Yeats’ arguably most famous poem, ‘The Second Coming’—no rhyming, but who can deny the musicality (admittedly of the Mahler 9th Symphony final movement sort) of
‘The darkness drops again, but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’
Always gives me a chill when I think of those lines, and not in a very good way. ‘The Second Coming’ does convey plenty of thought (though it embodies Yeats’ somewhat crackpot view of history). And Shakespeare’s plays, as vs. the sonnets, contain page after page of magnificent poetry with minimal use of rhyme—but literary musicality at the level of Bach’s unmatchable cantatas. On the other hand, Richard Eberhart’s The Groundhog has both, equaling I think anything that Yeats ever wrote for lyricism and easily beating it for depth of thought—the final stanza is stunning in its stark beauty, as a capstone to the line of thought that develops though the poem:
‘My hand capped a withered heart,
And thought of China and of Greece,
Of Alexander in his tent,
Of Montaigne in his tower,
Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament’.
It’s the musicality that makes great poetry great, and its lack that gives us the
*drabness* of so much contemporary poetry.
Agreed.
Metre & alliteration are equally of great importance. It is very hard to define poetry from doggrel sometimes. I used to write a lot of poetry. I also wrote songs. The two are quite different I found.
We were recently listening carefully to a bunch of 1960s/70s song lyrics and I agree (despite the pretensions of many, including Dylan — some of his qualify, IMO; but the vast bulk, not).
I agree mostly. I do like Whitman’s “O Captain, My Captain”, tho.
You cannot beat Burns – especially Tam o’Shanter and John Anderson my Jo.
But for sheer rhythm try “How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix”
Far more lowbrow, I still remember the first time I read Dr. Seuss’ “The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins” to my kid and trying, trying to fit it into a rhyme scheme. It wouldn’t go – it’s just prose. But my mental expectation of Dr. Seuss was so fixed it was hard to let that expectation go, and hard to like the story because it was so different from what I wanted it to be.
I guess the point is, writing prose is good. Writing poetry is good. Writing prose when your reader wants poetry, not so good. And for the reader: demanding poetry instead of just listening to and appreciating the prose the author gives you, also not so good.
My theory, which is mine, is that rhyming poetry originated as an effective way to remember long tales when writing was rare. I came to this view from noting that I can easily remember limericks and rugby songs from more than six decades ago, but I have trouble remembering short prose sentences over a period of minutes. Then crude pragmatism slowly mutated into artistic merit, and anybody who professed a lack of interest in poetry was derided as uncultured.
I agree! And along these same “oral traditions” lines, there’s a world of difference between reading any poem silently to yourself or reciting it (either to yourself or someone else). Frost is best appreciated out loud…
I think this is true (aloud is better) for almost all (good) poetry. That is the design, IMO.
Dylan Thomas’ poem “Elegy” is beautiful to read aloud. My favourite part is
https://www.best-poems.net/dylan_thomas/elegy.html.
🙂
This discussion seems to be about poetry in English, so perhaps my comment is not relevant, but in classical Latin and Greek poetry was not rhymed in the sense English or Spanish are. And probably Latin poetic constructions (stressing rhythm and balance) led to English “blank verse” (as in the opening of Milton’s Paradise Lost). Is that not poetry?
Odi et amo…
🤓👍
Arma virumque cano…
I would argue that some rhyming is forced & clumsy as well as predictable. My preference is for early modern poetry however, Elizabethan, that is sophisticated & borrowed heavily from Italian poets. Shakespeare’s plays are poetry, usually.
I also love alliteration & from Old Norse & Old English, kennings. But metre & rhythm are really important if you do not use rhyme.
If I were but
A tiny line
Of ink
Upon a page,
I’d lie emotionless
In inky solitude
Until,
My meaning read,
The refuse went
And I was burnt.
I definitely prefer rhyme in poetry (Poe did great and quite impressive things with rhymes and rhythm), and at the very least there should be some rhythmic character to it, as in the iambic pentameter of much of Shakespeare’s plays and all (!) of Paradise Lost. But there are exceptions to the rhyme requirement for me, much as for PCC(E), it seems. I love “The Second Coming” by Yeats, and there’s no real rhyme there. Also, quite a few of my favorite songs (which are arguably poetry) don’t have consistent rhymes, though most do. I college I had a course on 4 modern American poets and most of it I found simply unmoving, which I think was not the intent of the poets.
That should read “In college”. Sorry. I was not careful enough in proofreading my comment.
Poetry (by Yrsa Daley-Ward)
Nobody is saying anything at the dinner table tonight
Because everyone’s too angry.
The only noise is the sound of fine silver on bone china,
And other people’s children playing outside.
But this will give you poetry.
There is no knife in the kitchen sharp enough to cut the tension,
And your grandmother’s hands are shaking.
The meat and yam stick in your throat and you do not dare
Even to whisper “please pass the salt” .
But this will give you poetry.
Your father is breathing out of his mouth.
He is set to beat the spark out of you tonight for reasons
He isn’t sure of himself yet.
You will come away bruised.
You will come away bruised.
But this will give you poetry.
The bruising will shatter.
The bruising will shatter into black diamonds.
No-one will sit beside you in class.
Maybe your life will work.
Most likely it won’t at first.
But that will give you poetry.
Nice!
You can hear her talking about her life, and reading the poem, here (24:48 mins in): https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0b4yzvm
Thanks. We Americans owe a big debt to the Beeb. 🙂
Holy shit. And, um, yep.
Having once portrayed Walt Whitman in a one-man show, I became fairly conversant with some of the works of the man known as “the father of free verse”. In fact, “O Captain, My Captain” is the only poem of his that does rhyme. And yet, many of his other works at least have a musicality and rhythm that might transcend the need for rhyme. I submit here one of his shorter works, “My 71st Year”:
After surmounting three-score and ten,
With all their chances, changes, losses, sorrows,
My parents’ deaths, the vagaries of my life, the many tearing
passions of me, the war of ’63 and ‘4,
As some old broken soldier, after a long, hot, wearying march,
or haply after battle,
To-day at twilight, hobbling, answering company roll-call, Here,
with vital voice,
Reporting yet, saluting yet the Officer over all.
I’m no English teacher, but as others have mentioned, hearing the words spoken or speaking them yourself may help find the meter that is not readily apparent on the page.
I’ve always thought this too, but felt I was too uninformed on the subject. Glad to know others feel the same!
Like others here, I think a poem needs some kind of structure or obstacle in it, or rule. That challenges the poet and forces them to think more carefully about what they’re writing and thinking. Even just maintaining a particular mood or feel is enough. Goethe wrote in free verse sometimes, and it flows so beautifully one would barely notice it doesn’t rhyme, (Herbstgefühl, for eg.). And he wrote rhyming verse where each line standing alone could be said in normal spoken speech, (Wanderers Nachtlied II, for eg.).
In English I don’t think it’s extremely difficult to write a rhyming poem (rhyming at the end at least) which doesn’t sound corny. It works playfully, as in a few examples from other commenters above. Otherwise, to be honest, I think Dylan is the only one who could do it consistently. (Obviously he was fooling about with rhyme a lot too, and better than anyone else. And to those who say what he wrote in the 60s wasn’t poetry, I say fine, show me a poet who wrote anything better than Only a Pawn in Their Game. Or “My love she speaks like silence, Without ideals or violence.”)
Frederick Seidel is a wickedly good poet and America’s greatest living poet (my opinion). He uses rhyme extensively but not necessarily to create a pleasing effect. Seidel accepts the conventions of poetry (rhyme, line breaks, stanzas, etc), throws them into a WTF sort of blender, and pours out a poetry that speaks to our times without cowering to them. Start with his most recent collection, Peaches Goes It Alone, and work back from there.
I suspect that most people don’t find pleasure in today’s “serious” poetry and, for that reason, it is read mostly only by other poets, poet-wannabes and English profs–and that it is read for pleasure by nobody.
Rhyming is not, of course, the only artful “discipline” that can distinguish poetry from prose. But if writing follows no artful discipline at all, I find that I cannot enjoy it in the same way I enjoy poetry,
You’re a poet if you say you are; you’re a good poet if someone else says you are.
Hence a wannabe poet will scratch a tiny journal’s editor’s (poet’s) back in hopes he’ll scratch his or hers or whatever singular personal pronoun is in play.
Note: one may here substitute ‘kiss’ and ‘ass’ if so inclined.
But, as you say, it’s a safe bet that only the two of them will be making love.
To me, this sonnet by Frost shows the power of rhyme. The octave is the classic Petrarchan ABBA scheme. The sestet is a unique ACAACC scheme, ending with the powerful Shakespearian couplet that conveys the central message of the sonnet. Stunning.
Design by Robert Frost
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth–
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth–
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?–
If design govern in a thing so small.
Two Look At Two is also quite something….
I grow old…I grow old
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled
Some come to sit and think
Others come …
I think that it is rhythm, not rhymes, that makes the poem. Rhymes may help in achieving a desired rhythm (and certainly help memorising poems).
—
* Mary Oliver in ‘A Poetry Handbook – a prose guide to understanding and writing poetry’:
“The poem is always a blending of statement and form, which is intentional and meant to be clarifying.”
“[the need to understand] a poem as a structure of lines and rhythmic energy and repetitive sound”
“Poems must, of course, be written in emotional freedom. Moreover, poems are not language but the content of the language. And yet, how can the content be separated from the poem’s fluid and breathing body? A poem that is composed without the sweet and correct formalities of language, which are what sets it apart from the dailiness of ordinary writing, is doomed. It will not fly. It will be raucous and sloppy – the work of an amateur.”
—
Stephen Watson in ‘A Writer’s Diary’:
“There are times when one would like to pay homage to the god (no less) of cadence which, through the agency of breath, both lifts a line and let it fall; to that other god of rhythm in whose tidal movement language is once more married to its unconscious; to that deep underworld that resides in rhythmical properties of language; and finally to the breath itself whose literal inspiration, when it takes the form of poetry, is equivalent to the rediscovery of the divine in language.
Sometimes one would like to write a poetics of breath, even though any poem of worth does this in any case.” (19 January 1996)
“The failure to pursue the questions of aesthetics – all that we mean by matters of style – has any number of implications, almost all of them damaging. (…) A poetry that either ignores or displays little awareness of this condemns both itself and its audience to triviality and even meaninglessness.” (26 December 1995)
” (…)
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind. [Ezra Pound]
In fact, these fell thousands of miles away, in China, roughly 1000 years ago. Or in Pound’s imagination, to be exact. Yet the manner in which they fall still seems to me one of the most beautiful things in twentieth-century poetry. (…)” (24 May 1996)
Rhyme (or any structure) can also conceal meanings simply fulfilling subconscious expectations and thereby secretly planting a message that might become clearer at a much later date. For example, this, from Neil Young:
All your dreams and your lovers won’t protect you.
They’re only passing through you in the end.
They’ll leave you stripped of all that they can get to,
And wait for you to come back again.
Typical country song, but read it again, this time striking out the words “and your lovers”.
In my very, very humble opinion, this is the most perfect little poem in English. I am delivering it entirely from my still functioning 82 year old brain. It even contains several bits of fluvial geomorphology, in which I have some interest. — Joe
The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,
The fly her spleen, the little spark its heat;
The slender hairs cast shadows, though but small,
And bees have stings although they be not great.
Seas have their source and so have shallow springs,
And love is love, in beggars and in kings.
Where waters smoothest run, there deepest are the fords;
The dial turns, yet none perceive it move.
The firmest faith is found in fewest words;
The turtles do not sing and yet they love.
True hearts have ears and eyes, no mouth to speak;
They hear and see, and sigh, and then they break.
Wonderful – that was a new one to me, thanks!
Darwin thought about a related question: “As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.” But, “we have every reason to believe that man possessed these faculties at a very remote period” that our ancestors practiced a primitive form of it and possessed some approximation to melodic cognition. The idea here is there may have been an ancestral music-like/language-like communication system, analogous to the song-like vocalizations of other animals that emerged as a precursor to fully formed language and music in early humans. So it should be in song where we should look for the foundational underpinning of musical ability, rather than in instruments. If there is anything to this theory, that means this is also where we might find the antecedents of poetry, and why poetry today is musical. Rather, the components of musical cognition (e.g. a subset of them) are what define poetry. Historically all traditional poetry has rhyme or some other kind of music-like repetition.
UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.
The Lorax
Dr Seuss
If you search for Li Po (or Li Bai or Li Taibai) and a translation of his Green Mountain you will find many alternatives, such as:
You ask me why I live
In jade mountains.
I smile, unanswering.
My heart is calm.
Peach petals floating on the water,
Never come back.
There is a heaven and earth
Beyond the crowded town below.
Or
You ask why I perch in Green Mountains?
I chortle, don’t reply, my heart at ease!
Peach blossoms fall, float to the horizon,
Here in this no men world.
No rhyming but there is a structure of concepts or mental images, and to my mind the first version is more ‘poetic’. YMMV.
“Nor will I aver that poetry has declined as an art form (though I maintain that both jazz and classical music have)”. You’re not slipping that one in under the radar. Classical has declined as an art form compared to when? So much exciting and fascinating performance practice in mulitple genres, especially early music. Or do you mean newly composed works? I’ll take the latest from the likes of Max Richter or Philip Glass over most anything composed between during the atonal/arhythmic phases in the late 20th century. Come at me bra’ !!!!!
“Write a six-line poem about anything. But make it rhyme. No fair tennis without a net.”
-Kurt Vonnegut
In Haiku ‘the net’ is the 5,7,5 syllable structure (in the Western world), plus some sort of relationship between the poet and nature. Until they don’t observe the net, of course.
Or….
In Haiku’s “the net”
Is five, seven, five with some
Poets and Nature.
🙂
This from former Oregon poet laureate William Stafford when asked why he didn’t use more rhyme in his poems: “I think all sounds rhyme–sort of. I mean, any syllable sounds more like any other syllable than it sounds like silence.”
I completely agree. I was told by a getting card company that non-rhyming poetry was more popular, and yet if you look at pretty much ALL popular songs, they rhyme. Doesn’t make sense to me.
*greeting, not getting lol
Soon as I read your title I was ready for war! Then I read the opening sentence like, “okay, were cool.” haha
Although I do see the beauty behind all poetry, I don’t care much for poetry that doesn’t rhyme.
The way I see it, if you are going to write a poem, it should rhyme. Anything else should just be a memoir or a story. Also, anybody can just throw some words together and call it a poem, but it takes some thought and planning to make a poem rhyme. i have a poem that is a story, over 85 lines, and it all rhymes in aabba format.
Thank-you so much. I love making my poems rhyme. it’s so much fun.
I love Poetry that rhymes. I’m so glad that I am not the only one that feels that way. We should start a group to push for a return to formal verse. Down with free verse!
Of course poetry doesn’t have to rhyme, or even have meter, but at the very least it should have rhythm. If it doesn’t have any of those characteristics, how is it different from prose?
Far too much modern poetry doesn’t have any recognizable traits of poetry. Indeed, much of it seems to be purple prose, read in a whiny sing-song voice. It seems to come down to “this collection of words is a poem, because I say it is.”
By the way, how do you like -this- poem? 🙂