Excellent quotation, Bob, thanks for posting it. What is the name of the book that it is taken from? I don't have Wilbur's essays, just his interviews.

Andrew

But I find that very often rhyme-hating critics will do this: they ferret out the weaker rhymes in a metrical/rhyming poet's work and hold them up as exemplars. Every poet has weaker poems in a volume and some reviewers, it seems, will pounce on these poems, parade their weaknesses (especially if the rhymes are not as good as they should be), and suggest that the things they point to are characteristic of that poet's work, when they are not, when there are many brilliant, lovely, well-done rhyming works elsewhere in the volume.

The nasty review of Alicia's work that was in Poetry a while back did this, I think. Poet Joan Houlihan did the same thing to Timothy Steele's Winter Solstice. Both reviews followed this paradigm of selective unfairness.

It seems to me that a person would do this only if they had a predisposition against rhyme. So I think there are rhyme-haters out there. Maybe the sing-song Hallmark gang has given them a certain amount of spleen to vent against bad rhyme, but it also seems they are ill-disposed to all rhyming work and we see their prejudice.

dwl

Andrew, it's from "Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953-1976", from Story Line Press.

But David is right. There are plenty of people who are hostile to rhyme even when it is done well. And many others who are not overtly hostile, but do not seem to recognize its importance. I think of all the translators out there who so blithely omit rhyme and meter because they feel that this was just a minor embellishment the original poet chose as a sort of pretty bow to place on the profound thoughts that would be lost in a translation that tried to translate the bow. Translators who take this view are generally unable to write meter and rhyme at all, and so it's a rather convenient philosophy to adopt. Still, convenient or not, I fear it is often sincere.

[This message has been edited by Roger Slater (edited January 15, 2008).]

Thanks, Bob. I’ve already ordered a copy of the Wilbur book from Alibris. I’ve been meaning to read his essays for a while now.

And David, I remember that review on Alicia’s book too, and have seen similar pieces elsewhere. Given what Bob is saying about “many others who are not overtly hostile, but do not seem to recognize [rhyme’s] importance,” no wonder a lot of people don’t have the discernment to tell the good rhyming from the bad.

It makes you wonder: is it just a matter of not having read a lot of poetry of the past? If a person (or critic) loves the sonnets of Shakespeare, say, or Donne or Keats or Emily D., why would that person not like rhyme in a poem of the present, assuming it’s done well and the poem is substantial and written in current idiom, etc.?

Beats me.

Bob, my thanks too for your quotation from the Wilbur essay. I'll be looking for the book also.

Andrew, a hypothesis occurs to me about your question, which I'll boil down to "Why would readers value rhyme in older poetry and not in modern and contemporary poetry?"

Perhaps we can blame it on the tendencies of English lit syllabi, which stress only what's Historically Important, what comes to constitute a Movement. For the last century, until New Formalism, rhyme hasn't been part of "a movement." It's been "what was left behind". A survey-course familiarity with modern poetry--which is all most students of literature have--could leave one with the idea that it was something to pass beyond, a thing we weren't supposed to enjoy any more.

This is guesswork on my part, because my student days ignored the modern era almost completely, so it would be good to hear more from people currently learning or teaching.

Addendum: for some sterling examples of awful rhyming, and awful meter too, check out this essay on Poetry Daily.

It's not really a question of not valuing rhyme in modern poetry, at least for me. I can see the lure of free verse quite well, and I do not fault anyone for loving to read and write it. It's the scorn that some people have for meter and rhyme that confuses me, as if meter and rhyme alone are the poetic devices of the past that should be discarded. All other poetic devices, even if they are present in the hoary old poems of yesteryear, are still acceptable. If it were just a question of not wanting to recycle the past, then how did rhyme get to be the scapegoat? You might as well do what Perec once did and write without the letter E, since that vowel has been done to death.

I do question, though, whether anyone who truly loves and appreciates the rhyming and metrical poems of the past, rather than merely having been exposed to them in a class sometime and taught to "respect" them, could have no ear or appreciation for rhyme and meter of the present. I can't prove it, but I think that people who scorn rhyme and meter today are in fact covering up for their own deficiency in the area, like an abstract artist who scorns representational drawing and, by the way, can't actually draw a recognizable human face on a bet. How convenient that the talents we lack are not worth having.

Well said Roger/Bob. One thing though, I've mixed with a great many abstract painters and I've never heard a good abstract painter sneer at a drawing that is representational because it is representational. They "sneer" at any drawing, abstract or representational if it lacks important pictorial qualities such as tension, movement and general positive compositional qualities which are just as important in representational drawing as they are in abstract.

Pallid or pompous poetry is still that when the rhyme and meter is "correct". Vitality and purpose are what we admire.
Janet

Yes, irrational hatred of anything as harmless--nay, pleasant--as well-done rhyme must be a psychological defense of some kind. Why kick the dog if the dog is just doing what dogs do?

But even aside from writing verse, it's worthwhile too to become a skillful reader of poetry--not necessarily a critic, not a professor of poetry, just an artful, adventurous reader. And I don't see how that's possible without being able to appreciate rhyme as one of poetry's pleasures.

Yet even just plain ol' readers of verse give the old dog a kick these days, when all he wants is to bark in peace.

Maryann wrote most of what I was about to. I think that her hypothesis explains why some people excuse rhyme in pre-Modernist poetry and scorn later instances: Earlier poets, the thinking might go, just didn't know any better. Sort of how some of us will forgive very, very old people for their uncomfortable views on, say, gay people. It's worth noting that, ultimately, to proffer this sort of excuse is to practice a type of polite condescension.

Anyway. I also wanted to share an unrelated anecdote. I went to a Kay Ryan reading a week or two ago. (An amazing reading, by the way; anyone who has the chance to hear her, should.) During the Q&A that followed, she got to talking about rhyme, and in the discussion, mentioned that she finds end rhyme "paralyzingly funny."

At the same time, subscribers to Poetry have seen her write quite a bit about Frost, so who knows.

This piques my curiosity, Andrew. What sorts of things do you recall reading that tell you even plain folks are kicking rhyme? I ask because sometimes the opposite is asserted, as when we saw the announcement that John Whitworth's poem had won the TLS competition.

I've seen the warning "no rhymed poetry" in the various entries in Poets Market, and I've read a comment from a reader on another, more FV-oriented site to the effect that rhyme "sticks out" too much, and I've seen reference, in a review in EP&M, to a professor in a creative writing program who doesn't want students to rhyme. And just recently, we've seen the commenter on Alicia's essay, who's surely a poet and a reader of contemporary poetry. So that's editors, teachers, and FV poets, but not plain folks, as I see it.

I'm not meaning to challenge or refute the idea, just wondering how much we know.

editing back: John, we cross-posted, but it looks like we're in agreement http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif