We often encounter assonant rhyming in day-to-day language (e.g., in phrases like “mean streets,”  “shoot hoops,” and “live wire”), and it is ubiquitous in popular music (a random example being lines from a Neil Young song, “I have a friend I’ve never seen./ He hides his head inside a dream....”).  In poetry, by contrast, assonant end-rhyme has a long history of being viewed as a telltale sign of a poet’s lack of skill. To better grasp this reputation’s apparent rehabilitation, it will be helpful briefly to look backward in time to gain some historical perspective of disapproval and stirrings in the direction of  acceptance of such assonant end-rhymes as husk/dust, call/waft, and swept/depths.

         In 1936, The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet’s Craft Book was published, an updated edition of which remains in print.  While this dictionary may read quaintly and often amusingly today, it portrays something of the taste and sentiment of its time.  Furthermore, despite the dictionary’s often dated stances, various of its ideals continue to survive in assorted states of health and decline.

         In the dictionary’s introduction, the editor, Clement Wood, briefly examines the ABCs of prosody, factually describing the various meters and stanzaic forms.  In the midst of these workmanly passages appears a section entitled “Correct and Incorrect Rhyme.”  In this section, Wood begins, “Rhyme is as simple to define as rhythm is difficult,” and goes on confidently to note that the only “correct” rhymes are of the variety of ate/bait/plate/mate/abate/straight/syncopate.

         From the perspective of our allegedly kinder, gentler, politically correct age (the social workers of which eschew “labeling language”), we might find amusement in Wood’s confident zest in making his rounds, segregating the good poets from the bad: “Slovenly rhyming is one of the sure signs of mediocrity in versification.”  Wood provides several examples of “slovenly” rhymes, to include real/steal and childhood/wildwood.  On the subject of the inadvisability of attempting to rhyme north with forth, Wood notes, “If the poet is tone deaf as to sounds, it is best to rely upon the phonetic symbols above each group of the rhyming words in...this book.”

         Wood singles out both consonance and assonance as “incorrect rhyme.” In the case of the former, he notes the unacceptability of such consonant slant rhyme (or “sour rhyme”) as earth/hearth and silver/deliver.  However, even as Wood was pontificating on the slovenliness of consonant slant rhyme-endings, Yeats and Hopkins were in the midst of writing the poems which brought about their acceptance in British and American poetry.

         The idea of using consonant slant-rhyme line-endings had not sprung into these poets’ heads ex nihilo. Rather, the ground had been broken with earlier poets’ efforts. In the seventeenth century, Henry Vaughan was one of the earliest English poets to attempt to incorporate consonant slant rhymes as end-rhymes.  Later in America, Emerson and Dickinson vigorously embraced consonant slant-rhyme line-endings, though their efforts generally continued to be viewed as more or less odd until the wide acceptance of Yeats’ and Hopkins’ poetry.  Since the canonization of Yeats’ and Hopkins’ poetry, consonant slant-rhyme line-ending has attained general acceptability, even among the most archly judgmental of formalist poets and readers.