Oh, there is something uniquely awful about badly rhymed poetry--the distortions to get the rhymes, the obviousness of them, the way that the poorly chosen rhyme word can completely undercut any meaning built up.
And really, rhyme's an obvious poetic device, and at the end of a line, it's pretty easy to identify. Sit through a few open mikes. Particularly in New York City. Listen to the bad rhymed stuff. It is actually worse than unrhymed stuff of similar imaginative and linguistic poverty. The unrhymed stuff just sounds like drivel or stupidity or what have you. You get all that with a godawful rhymed piece, but with the ugliness of a badly used device, often with the language distorted in such a way as to call attention to its ill use.
Quincy
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