The submission guidelines for a journal I looked at read, “No rhyming poetry.” I feel that rhyme is nevertheless justified in poetry, but that rhyme must justify itself. In writing rhyming poetry, it must be clear why the poem is rhyming. I’m not referring to hip-hop conventions.
I recently read Shelley’s EPIPSYCHIDION. Shelley assumed by means of poetic convention that his epic must rhyme. In fact, while I’m no Shelley scholar, I think that most of his poetry, maybe all of his poetry, did rhyme and employ metrics. Wordsworth considered Shelley a master of style, perhaps the greatest stylist of the English Romantic period. But in reading EPIPSYCHIDION, I found the language tortured in order to unite rhyme, metrics, and sense. I’m afraid to say the same of Shakespeare’s sonnets. But a baroque use of language is proper for a Renaissance poet. It would not be appropriate for Frost, and Frost masterfully writes rhyme so liquidly that it reads like prose.
On the other side of this discussion is Carl Sandburg. He privileged immediate expression and despised the reworking of an original impression in order to form rhyme and rhythm. So we get a massive collection of insignificance.
Making a poem rhyme for no reason is a recipe for insignificance, too. But then, there is sense that wants to rhyme and beat. Blake’s THE TYGER has to be in rhyme and rhythm. Otherwise the poignant line, “When the stars threw down their spears/And water’d heaven with their tears” wouldn’t be such a dramatic shift in voice. And the energy of the tyger wouldn’t be there without the rhyme and beat that make the tyger burn. I started to write a poem about flowers a while back, not that I’m a Blake or Shelley by any means, and realized that a poem about something pretty and delicate should be pretty and delicate, too. A loose set of lines wouldn’t be as formally structured as a flower is. So the flowers spoke in rhymed stanzas of meter.
Rhyming doesn’t go in poems that exhibit a deconstruction of language as do those of Wallace Stevens and others. (I know that Stevens wrote before deconstruction was invented.) In his poems, any word he fancies could be called into the mix of his abstract arrangements of language. So rhyme would be meaningless. Even if Stevens wanted to emphasize a couplet with rhyme, it would fail, since there is essentially no emphasis anywhere in his poetry. That’s the whole point.
So I didn’t even consider submitting to the journal that prohibited rhyming poetry. Rhyme and rhythm are as important to poetry as are free verse, deconstruction, or any other style persons prefer. But today, rhyme isn’t a convention–perhaps the opposite. And a poem must prove its use of rhyme.
David Fekete 