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         Fast-forwarding in time, we encounter assonant end-rhyme mutating into modernity in the poetry of Dylan Thomas, as in his “Poem in October.”  Crisp Modernist Matisse-like visual color softens in the following passage, losing its edges and boundaries in sound (stone/flows, blue/tune), achieving an aural dimension divergent from Matisse’s delineated boundaries:

Over the blue stone
Blue water flows,
And clouds in the blue
Silence of the deep tune.

         Around the same time in America, assonant rhyme was an interest of Weldon Kees, a poet who has been much admired by and who has influenced several of our time’s formalist poets.  The following is an example of Kees’ use of assonant line-ending.  The passage provides an example of a lyric poise which has influenced passages in Dana Gioia’s poetry:

And shores and strands and naked piers,
Sunset on waves, orange laddering the blue,
White sails on headlands, cool
Wide curving bay, dim landward distances
Dissolving in the property of local air.

(“Henry James at Newport”)

         Here Kees uses the assonant line-ending of blue/cool, among other devices, to produce the effect of fresh, seaside expansiveness and easiness.  The partnering of the soothing u-sounds of blue and cool accentuates the seaside’s physical sensation of happy release. Incidentally, this passage is interesting to examine in noting how easily Kees could have modified this stanza to attain a more conventional rhyme, simply by dropping the s from piers which then would have become a consonant slant rhyme with air. However, beyond the question of accurately portraying the landscape, Kees favored leaving the s on piers, preferring for it to echo the s on distances; thus, piers and distances become sonically linked in the reader’s ear, subtly joining in the reader’s mind to accentuate the described beach’s and seaside’s open distances.  Also the resultant sonic separation of piers/air produces a gracefully indefinite closure at the stanza’s end, the word air somewhat but not really rhyming with the distantly preceding pier, Kees allowing air’s heavy, diffusive vowel sound to hang at stanza’s end.

         Current formalist poetry ranges into degrees of variation in all aspects of its prosody, from rhyme to meter to the structures of given forms. Before focusing on current uses of assonance, we might first gain an insight into this general climate of variation. A quick means of doing so is to note some activity surrounding the sonnet.  With exasperation in the Hudson Review, Robert Phillips discussed the anthology Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism:

         The inclusion of the Leithauser bastard form is but one of a number of [the anthology’s] editorial mistakes or lapses in judgment.  Others include Julia Alvarez’s “hybrid sonnets” with deviant rhymes (live/psychoanalyzed).  Mary Jo Salter’s 9-line poem is called a “curtal sonnet,” as is Wyatt Prunty’s 8-line “Insomnia.”  At least Prunty’s reads like an octave in search of a sestet.  Molly Peacock’s “The Wheel” is presented as a “Double Sonnet,” yet consists of 29 lines, not 28.  Peacock’s English sonnet, “Desire,” is highly irregular in meter.  Another poem is called an “Exploded Sonnet,” because it runs to 16 lines.  Does this mean we can look forward to Exploded Haiku?