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
|