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.
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