Does something have to rhyme to be considered poetry?

Great Debates
41

betenoir wrote:

It might stop people from trying using the dictionary to settle arguments about aesthetics.

I prefer you don’t make goodness or badness a criterion for poetry.

For the third time, verse referrs to writing that is end-stopped (turned, as the Romans would say) at points for aesthetic purposes.

This turning is not meter, though often the structure of verse is determined by meter. Furthermore, not all verse is metrical in the sense of having a regular meter.

I wouldn’t say it has to have meter, in the sense of regular meter, but I do think that any poem written without reguard to meter is probably going to be a bad one.

What was that you were saying about getting nowhere?

Rhythm is about as good a candidate for an essential element of poetry as anything you could name. All other poetic techniques are effectively just ways to invoke rhythm. Meter, most obviously, does this, in both accent-syllable verse and the old Greek quantitative verse.

Rhyme, while it has a special effect of its own, also expresses rhythm, whether used regularly like in an Emily Dickinson poem or a Shakespearean Sonnet, or in ragged syncopation like in a John Skelton poem or a Tom Waits lyric. The rhythm of the rhyme complements and counter-points the rhythm of the meter.

Verse, the turning of the line, establishes a rhythm, whether it represents a verbal pause, or the end of a breath or just the end of a metrical unit. In modern poetry, verse is often used visually, to establish a sense of rhythm through the use of space, or to break up thoughts, creating tension between a word and the word that comes after it.

End-stopped rhyme verbally cues the turn of the line of verse, and thus the end of a metrical unit, and the distance we have traveled since the last one. It’s the slow beat that all the little beats hum and hustle about. The reason we rhyme poems is because it allows us to hear rhythms within rhythms within rhythms. It gives dimension to the words and tells us that we’ve been somewhere and we’re going somewhere. It puts us on a train and lets us hear the horn blowing, the engine chugging and the wheels clicking against the rails.

42

Fascinating discussion. It never ceases to amaze me how literate and well-read Dopers, as a community, are. I’d wager half or more of the cited poems here were typed from memory, as opposed to transcribed from a source.

The best comparison of prose and poetry I ever heard was deceptively simple-minded. I was in a writing workshop, and the star of the group was a writer who was undeniably light-years beyond any of the rest of us. His phrase was this: “The only difference between poetry and prose is that prose goes to the right margin.”

At first, I thought it was glib and easily dismissed, an arrogant pronouncement from a writer who had earned the right to make arrogant pronouncements. So did most of the group. But then I kept thinking about it, and I realized how much information was packed into that simple statement. Packing of information, in my mind, is a hallmark of poetry: William Carlos Williams is only the most famous exemplar of this. Everything in poetry is important, the way the words echo one another, creating more meaning than is present in the straight text. Obviously, you can do this in regular prose, but then you end up with Joyce, and it’s hard to read. In poetry, you break up the lines to guide the reader; poets like e e cummings certainly use the shape of the text to underline elements of meaning. The writer’s phrase was, I finally decided, a deliberately ironic misstatement.

And going back to a previous point: In my classical acting class, we read volumes and volumes of Shakespeare, and I came away with the tidbit that only one of Shakespeare’s plays is written entirely in verse, beginning to end. IIRC, it’s Richard II, but I don’t have my Riverside in front of me and I can’t confirm that. But FWIW, if memory serves, every single Shakespearean play has at least a small amount of prose, except for one.

43

To me the best poem is “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, by Coleridge. That is, until someone satisfactorily finishes his “Kubla Khan”.

44

I can’t reference this, but going from memory:
Milton enormously influenced the poetry of Modern English by importing many techniques and elements from Italian poetry. He was the first to really take the more relaxed attitude to rhyming in English poetry that we’re all used to (compare the earlier poet Chaucer for example, who rhymed pretty consistently). Sometimes Milton rhymed, sometimes not. Partly, at least, this was because the Italians weren’t all that concerned with rhyme, since case endings meant that grammatically correct sentences were extremely easy to rhyme. So in Italian rhyme doesn’t carry the same impact that it takes on in German-derived English.

Poetry doesn’t have to rhyme, obviously, but it is one more technique for connecting ideas and adding interesting structure to the language. Personally, I find it very satisfying when rhyme is handled skillfully by a good poet. Unfortunately, because rhyme is the most obvious element of poetry apparent to children, it has come to be considered a sign of “higher appreciation” of poetry to reject rhyming. Silly.

45

Sigh again.
I was not attempting to settle an argument about aesthetics. I was attempting to define the terms used in an argument. I go to the dictionary to settle semantic arguments.

I’m not sure I understand you. I was making “goodness” or “badness” the criteria for good and bad poetry. (Or poetry and doggerel, or poetry and mere verse- the words have been used in that sense.) In an aesthetic argument isn’t goodness or badness the criteria?

OK, thank you for telling me for a third time. But it seem like you and pulykamell are both saying meter is essential (inasmuch as rythme is essential) but not necessarily “strict” or “regular” meter.

Of course we would get nowhere. But it would be fun.

As for the rest of your post- I’m sorry but I agree with you completely.

46

APB9999 – I agree with you completely. Skillfully handled rhyme is very satisifying to read. I read a complaint in the other thread that said “why doesn’t poetry rhyme anymore?” which is just plain untrue. One of my favorite modern poets, Seamus Heaney (Nobel Prize for Literature winner), is a master of rhyme and form. I am in constant awe of his technique – he employs notoriously difficult forms such as terza rima and creates a poem which is true to its historical origins (formally), yet does not sound outmoded. If you open up a copy of the New Yorker, you will still find poems that rhyme and use traditional form. Unfortunately, I believe that many people have had bad experiences with poetry and tend to polarize it into two extremes. Either they feel that there is a mass intellectual coup against form and that somehow older forms have disappeared and become “uncool” or they believe that form is an outdated concept and should be done away with, and that expression is much more important than form, and they snobbishly look down on anything resembling the traditional.

At my risk, I will generalize. People who reject rhyming as a sign of “higher appreciation” are usually wanna-be coffeehouse poets who do not have a true appreciation of their craft. It’s simply straightforward snobbish behavior which they use to try to feed their egos and feel they have some sort of intellectual one-up on people who like rhyme. It’s childish, faddish behavior. As an artist, you should respect your history.

It’s a pity, but these two simplified views are myopic. Yes, there is a tendency away from traditional form, but that’s apparent in any art. It’s a matter of keeping it fresh, of reinventing the artform, of keeping it alive. Art would be dead and boring otherwise. At the same time, the old forms have been kept alive. They are NOT disappearing.
People are finding new contexts for the old forms. There is no reason for anyone to panic. Just because Schoenburg offered forth a 12-tone approach to musical composition doesn’t mean that the concept of melody disappeared from 20th century music. Music simply became more enriched, and more interesting (the cynical may argue this point.) Composers still write melodies today, but they have a much larger arsenal of compositional techniques at their disposal, and hence a greater palatte with which to express themselves. It’s the same with poetry.

47

Perhaps a less well-known and definitely less discussed poet, Langston Hughes, has several poems that do not rhyme. My favorite of all may see trite, but it nonetheless conveys depth.

I, Too, Sing America
By Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed–

I, too, am America.

or one of his better known poems:

The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Langston Hughes

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Or, Maya Angelou’s Inaugural poem:
(only one verse as it is a very long piece)

On The Pulse of Morning
The Clinton Inaugural Poem

A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon.
The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

I think all poetry is poetry regardless of rhyme, meter or scheme. It just has to mean something to someone – or say something to someone.

48

betenoir wrote:

My point is that the question is an aesthetic one, and that a dictionary definition is useless in this case. One of these days, I’m going to teach a writing class and one of the first things I’m going to tell students is not to ever quote the dictionary. It’s not a work of philosophy, nor of social criticism, nor of aesthetics. It’s just a lexicon. It may have a definition for life' but it does not explain the meaning of life. It has an entry for poem’ which will not help you write one, or appreciate one. In an argument of this kind, it’s not even an adequate resource for framing the question, because as I’ve pointed out, your dictionary has got it wrong to begin with.

You said, “Not all verse is poetry. Some verse is doggerel.”

As such, you treat the quality of the piece as a criterion for poetry.

Rhythm is essential, but it can be achieved in other ways than with metrics. But that’s doing it the hard way.