[Roger Slater]

I recently encountered this in a Richard Wilbur essay entitled "The Bottle Becomes New, Too," and I daresay it says well what most of us have sometimes experienced in the writing of our best rhyming efforts.

Rhyme also has the virtue of meaninglessness, and if it is austerely used it has the virtue of difficulty. It is always bad when rhymes write a poem. But rhyme is a device of great formal and magical value, and many writers have demonstrated that it is possible not to let it run away with you. A really rigorous rhyming poet can redeem from banality almost any rhyme in the language, even the perilous cat / rat .

As a matter of fact, it is precisely in its power to suggest comparisons and connections --unusual ones-- to the poet that one of the incidental merits of rhyme may be said to lie. Say to yourself lake, rake, and then write down all the metaphors and other reconciliations of these terms which occur to you within one or two minutes. It is likely to be a long list, extending from visual images of wind furrowing the water, to punning reminiscences of Lancelot and Guinevere. The presence of potential rhymes sets the imagination working with the same briskness and license with which a patient's mind responds to the psychologist's word-association tests. When a poet is fishing among rhymes, he may and must reject most of the spontaneous reconciliations (and all of the hackneyed ones) produced by trial combinations of rhyming words, and keep in mind the preconceived direction and object of his poem; but the suggestions of rhyme are so nimble and so many that it is an invaluable means to the discovery of poetic raw material which is, in the very best sense, farfetched. I hope it is perfectly clear that I am not advocating automatic writing or any such supinity: one may get full suggestive use out of the contemplation of rhymes without letting them write the poem."