I personally prefer rhyming poems, especially the kind that begin:
There once was a maiden from Raleigh…
But I digress.
My understanding of poems vs. prose is that poetry is economy in writing. It encapsulates an event, a scene, a moment in brief verbal images.
Prose can sprawl out verbally, if you get my drift. Naturally, there is always a blurring of the line. Prose often contains elements that are poetic in nature, especially descriptive prose. And poetry, especially some of those epics, waffle on and on. But they have conformed to an accepted poetic structure.
I simply don’t see how The Fog by Carl Sandburg could be considered prose because of the mere fact that it doesn’t rhyme. It’s a poem. Not as good as the “maiden from Raleigh” one, but a poem nonetheless.
Of man’s first disobediance, and the fruit
Of that Forbiden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, til one greater man
Restore us, and regain the blissfull seat. . .
You can’t argue that Milton ain’t writting poetry, or that he was horribly modern. I will say, though, that non-rhyming (and even more so, non-traditionally-structured) poetry is a form that is particularly accessable to adolecents with no talent, and thus the genre has been flooded by some truly terrible stuff. But you shouldn’t let that taint the work of talented, innovative poets who do thier best to tweak language in new ways. POetry attracts everyone who wants to be an artist but isn’t willling to invest in supplies, so you get a lot of misrable stuff. Dosen’t mean that all poets are lacking in talent.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
Sure sounds like it rhymes to me. (As do most of Dickinson’s poems, although she favors slant-rhymes such as “comes / tombs” or “soul / all.”)
Actually, Tengu, many of Shakespeare’s plays contain at least some prose in them. As I alluded to in the other thread, the Bard’d use iambic (or sometimes trochaic) pentameter usually to denote lovers or noblemen…most of the commoners, however, spoke in unmetrical prose. Falstaff, for example, spoke in prose, as did Hal when he was putting on his common face. I’m not sure if there’s any Shakespeare play entirely written in prose–although, glancing over The Merry Wives of Windsor, I can’t seem to find any blank verse.
This is the rhyme scheme for the first two stanza’s of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.
AABCCDDEFF
GGHGHIJI
Obviously there is rhyming going on there. But it’s sporadic throughout the whole poem. The rhyming scheme for the first stanza is not the same as the second line, and so on through the whole poem. It doesn’t have any kind of rhyming form. So the poem as a whole is not a “rhyming poem”, at least, not what I would consider as one.
Okay, first things first:
PSALM:[n] 1. A sacred song or poem; hymn. 2. Any of the sacred songsin praise of God constituing the Book of Psalms in the Bible.
Next on the agenda: IMO, a poem doesn’t have to rhyme, but it has to have some soul to it. Sometimes even if the said groupings of verse that follow all the rules for the type of meter it has, and rhymes perfectly, but has no soul, then it isn’t a poem to me. Nothing gives it power to become a piece of artistic writing, and is therefore not a poem in my eyes. Trite things also are not poetry to me.
The definition of poe was provided, but what about the definition of poetry?
Ok, there you do. Nothing about rhyming. In fact, if I’m a poet, and I designate something as a poem, it is. This whole post was in fact a poem.
happy?
Bad rhyming poetry is jarring, but people’s gut reaction is too often to reject rhyming in general, rather than reject only doggrel. A poet who cannot rhyme well has other incompetencies, and what bothers me more than bad rhyming is the attempt to hide the poet’s incompetence by burying it in fluid verse.
betenoir wrote:
ahem
All verse is poetry.
Not all verse rhymes.
The term verse refers not to the rhyming, or even to the lyrical quality of the piece. It refers to the fact that the line turns – from the Latin versus, -a, -um – that a new line is started for some aesthetic reason rather than because that’s the end of the thought or you’re out of space on the paper.
Blank verse, such as used by Milton or Shakespeare, is a good example of the unnecessity for poetry to rhyme. But blank verse may not be what most people recognize as poetry if they insist it must rhyme. They’re thinking of lyrical verse. Rhyming is an important tool in the lyricist’s toolbox. But if you’ll memorize this piece by Thomas Campion, it will remind you that a lyrical quality can be achieved without any rhyming at all:
Rose-cheeked Laura
ROSE-cheeked Laura, come,
Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty's
Silent music, either other
Sweetly gracing.
Lovely forms do flow
From concert divinely framed;
Heav'n is music, and thy beauty's
Birth is heavenly.
These dull notes we sing
Discords need for helps to grace them;
Only beauty purely loving
Knows no discord,
But still moves delight,
Like clear springs renewed by flowing,
Ever perfect, ever in them-
Selves eternal.
But – and I wish to emphasize this particularly – neither is it the case that rhyming makes a poem any lesser.
Well I was definitly wrong about that. Verse is any metrical language.
But I stand by the second part of my comment. I was making a value judgement. Not all verse is poetry. Some verse is doggerel. To wit:
(Merriam-Webster) verse [1] (noun)
definition 2 a (2) metrical writing distinguished from poetry esp. by it’s lower level of intensity.
At least that was the distinction i was going for. The issue of quality of verse does seem relevant to the question.
But all the definitions, dictionary and personal, point to the idea that a poem (and verse) has meter but not necessarily rhyme.
Settle back with something in a brandy snifter and listen to “Moonlight in Vermont.” (Willie Nelson in his “Stardust” album will do–especially since I think he has a crummy voice and the writing has to carry itself) Then listen for it to rhyme.
To demand poetry to rhyme is to put it in a straitjacket.
Remember that poetry was not always art. The use of rhyme or alliteration was used as a memory jog during a time when most of the world’s knowledge was spoken. We lost the need for those memory jogs shortly after Johann Gutenberg invented movable type.
capacitor – thanks for the mending wall reference! one of the greatest poems in english, and in blank verse, as well.
There are so many issues to address here.
First, there is no reason poetry has to rhyme. There is no reason poetry needs a rigid structure, although I find poetry with some structure more appealing than “free verse” poetry. It’s like trying to say that Kandinsky and Miro were not artist painters because they painted non-representationally. Poetry is a fickle thing. One man’s poetry is another man’s trash. So I’m not going to delve too much into defining exactly what poetry is, simply because I can’t.
I can try to describe, however.
On the issue of teenage non-rhyming and rhyming trash, I have to say that both get on my nerves so much. I suppose a lot of teenagers go through their melodramatic phases, but when you put a highly emotional subject into hard iambic tetrameter rhyme, you only ridicule the seriousness of your subject even more:
“Last night my sick old mother died,
My dad had found her and he cried
With whom these thoughts shall I confide?”
blah blah blah
Don’t rhymes like that just make squirm and laugh out loud? OK, my off-the-cuff example is a little belittling, but you will find examples like this out there. You are taking a subject, and completely adapting the wrong tone to it.
It’s like trying to write a dirge with a “Johnny B. Goode” backbeat to it. It ain’t gonna work. (unless you are a genius.)
At the same time, there are the people who write free verse with absolutely no concept of poetic form. Most free verse, except the most liberal, has some sort of backbone. Whether it be the use of alliteration, assonance, internal rhymes, repitition of certain words, etc, etc, etc, there usually is something holding it together. It is based on cadence, rather than meter. There is repetition of subject, of image, or of syntactical patterns.
Let’s take Whitman’s Song of Myself:
This is a typical example of free verse. But there is an inherent structure in it. There is a repetition of theme, of words. Alliteration is apparent “lean and loafe,” or the sibilance of “spear of summer grass.” There is parallelism in lines two and three. etc, etc, etc. That’s just a cursory glance at these lines.
This is still poetry, and I challenge any people who think that poetry needs to rhyme. Read Whitman’s poems outloud. There is a musicality in his words, there is a pattern in his structures. There is a definite precision that is different from the precision of an established prose writer.
On the other hand, I find it disturbing that people nowadays seems to scorn poetry that rhymes, or do away with learning about the formalities of rhythm and rhyme, feet and form. These are tools that can only help you in free-verse experimentation and widen your awareness on poetry in general. Once again, let’s use the painter analogy. Look at Kandinsky’s colorful expressionist paintings or Pollack’s “splash” pieces. These two artists were very well-trained in the classical representational approach to art, and did very well with portrait sketches, still lives, etc. However, they chose to go beyond this, and explore their art in a non-representation, counter-conventional framework. Pollack didn’t simply get a couple buckets of paint and start splashing down on canvasses. He had a good grasp of what he was trying to do, and had a good grasp on the history which preceded him.
For me, it is required, or at least immensely helpful, to be knowledgeable in the technique and history of your art before you can truly break these conventions.
I have much more to say, but it seems that’s enough for now.
Merriam-Webster is a pretty good dictionary. Here’s how you can make it even better: tear this page out.
The turning of the line is the essential element in verse.
As difficult as it is to define poetry, we’ll get nowhere by making it a normative term. Furthermore, it fails to admit that there is such a thing as bad poetry, which we know is not true.
Poetry doesn’t have to rhyme, of course, but I sure do admire the craftmanship of well-rhymed verse. Non-rhyming poetry seems like the lazy way out, by comparison.
Huh? “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” is rhyming verse. Check it out here:
Ok, maybe I’m unclear on what rhyming verse is. In my mind a poem “rhymes” when it has a clear scheme throughout the whole work. For example
ABABCDCDEE
FGFGHIHIGG
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” looks more like this
AABCCDDEFF
GGHGHIJI
Sigh
We will get nowhere tearing pages out of dictionaries. If was in a (pretty good) dictionary it is because it has been used in that sense, enough to warrent inclusion. It is not the only definition of verse (it was definition 2 a [2]) but it was, as I said, the definition I was intending.
If you prefer “doggerel”, or “bad poetry” that’s fine with me. But if verse is “metrical language” (is that different that "the turning of the line?) then not all verse is good poetry.
So if we’ve establish that poetry doesn’t have to rhyme, but it has to be metered (and I personally think we have) why don’t we talk about (well we already are really) what is (good) poetry?
What for example is the signifigence of metering? (I still go with my badly articulated idea about disrupting the linear nature of prose.)
And why do we hate those poor inarticulate teenagers so much?
All right, we’ll leave the poor, inarticulate teenagers out of it.
Jimpy –
A “prose poem” is something completely different than a poem in blank verse, or free verse.
Let’s take this selection from Robert Bly:
This is an example of prose poetry … This is totally different from “The Mending Wall” or Shakespeare’s plays.
Visually, it’s different, as it’s not broken down into lines or stanzas. It looks like a piece of prose, and really blurs the line between poetry and prose, and I would simply call it “poetic prose.” It becomes really tricky once you get to this fine a detail. What separates this from, say, a block of writing from Nabakov’s “Lolita,” which certainly becomes very poetic at times? Honestly, other than the compactness of the prose poem, not a heck of a whole lot.
But when you deal with blank verse, that’s another matter.
If I write Mending Wall as:
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that sends the frozen ground-swell under it and spills the upper boulders in the sun, and makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come and made repair where they have left not one stone on a stone, but they would have the rabbits out of hiding to please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, no one has seen them made or heard them made but at spring-mending time we find them there …”
This doesn’t make it a prose-poem. It is a poem. Period. It is not prose with the qualities of poetry. It is poetry which I happened to write as prose in this case. The rhythm of these lines are so clearly iambic that you can’t disguise the fact that it is a poem. If you can’t hear the rhythm, maybe that’s why you’re having such difficulty classifying non-rhyming verse as poetry.
And it isn’t a case of academia or a bunch of coffe-house intellectuals “rallying around a point.” I don’t think ever in the history of literature was rhyming a requirement for poetry. As was mentioned before, different cultures had different devices for poetry. The Greeks, for instance, are from whom we borrow our term “metrical feet” – the anapest, dactyl, iamb, trochee, spondee, etc, etc, etc …
In Greek, however, metric poetry was much different than in English. It wasn’t a matter of “unstress-stress” for an iamb. It was “short-long” vowel sounds. The long vowel sounds actually were voiced longer than short ones. Hungarian is one of the few languages where you can still have true iambic poetry, because they have short and long vowels in the same manner the Greeks did. However, it’s immensely impractical with the way words work here.
Hence, the Hungarians have a completely different tradition. Another example, Polish poetry also makes use of rhyme sometimes, but it’s easier to “cheat” on a rhyme because of the way the nouns in the language decline. You can make rhymes based on grammitical idiosyncracies in the language. The stress also always falls on the penultimate syllable, and in Hungarian on the first, so an English-style metrical poem would not be practical.
So poetry does not have a universal scheme to it. That said, we can only go by tradition, and, once again, at no point in our poetic tradition was rhyme necessary for poetry.
The first known poem in English is Caedmon’s Hymn, written by a shepherd in 657. This poem, written in Old English, was an alliterative tetrameter, in which at least two of the four stressed words in a line alliterate. St. Bede’s work and Beowulf followed, employing similar techniques. These were the first techniques used. Rhyme developed historically as an amalgamation of widely used techniques such as alliteration, assonance and consonance.
John Milton, who tried to write as God would speak in Paradise Lost, completely disapproved of rhyme. I would hardly call him any less of a poet for it. There is also Robert Frost, who called “free verse” like “playing tennis without a net,” and he certainly approved of blank verse.
So, Jimpy, you’re free to call your type of poetry “rhyming poetry,” but under no circumstances are you allowed to call blank verse, haiku, or any non-rhyming form “prose poetry.”
It’s wrong.
