Decline of rhyme in poetry

[brynmawr1]

A friend posted this graph from an article in The Economist about the decline of rhyme in modern english poetry.  You will likely need a subscription to actually read the article, but I included it for those that do.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1D1nY5HDe8/

I am agnostic about whether it is good or bad.  I do think the attempt at rhyme is responsible for most bad poetry.

[milo]

A friend posted this graph from an article in The Economist about the decline of rhyme in modern english poetry.  You will likely need a subscription to actually read the article, but I included it for those that do.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1D1nY5HDe8/

I am agnostic about whether it is good or bad.  I do think the attempt at rhyme is responsible for most bad poetry.

I searched the keywords and found this on Facebook:

=AZYe1CQUfz4kFS_LCXXfo0S1fmlkRKTdo9qjx9CZHgV7ltt4XzrveLRFINeU7uDc7JqxJUd4-QdXzbJ7SliJmUeKOdgbz06i1MTwuE9BJ-VapExe_OS4GFHez2wr81mDVpUKztgm9L53l3S8RaGtkpm7u7CmTEuXHQka6gqvJ4hLjQ&__tn__=R]-R]Poetry Festival Singapore


For Jeremy Bentham, a philosopher, poetry was simply writing that “fails” to reach the end of the line. For W.H. Auden, a poet, poetry was that which “makes nothing happen”. Arnold Bennett, a writer, disagreed: he thought poetry was very powerful. The mere word “poetry” could, he said, “scatter a crowd” faster than a firehose.
What unites these descriptions of poetry is that none uses the word “rhyme”. When A.E. Housman, a poet, gave a 51-page lecture titled “The Name and Nature of Poetry” in 1933 he used the word “rhyme” just once, and then only in the phrase “bad rhyme”. Martin Heidegger, in an essay titled “What Are Poets For?” (1946) was similarly avoidant: the philosopher used the word “abyss” 16 times, “death” five—and rhyme not once.
View Image -
Poets rarely define poetry by whether or not it rhymes. This is just as well, for now it hardly does. P.G. Wodehouse, a novelist, divided poetry into the “old-fashioned kind with rhymes in it” and the modern stuff about “gas-works and decaying corpses”. The Economist’s analysis of 11,000 poems in English finds verse firmly in the gas-works and corpses camp. In 1900, 80% of poems contained rhyme; today, only around 25% do. Numbers of rhymes fell too: at the start of the 20th century over 60% of lines rhymed; now under 5% do (see chart). Rhyme, says Wendy Cope, a poet, has become “pretty unfashionable”.
Poetry’s most prestigious prizes bear that out. The contenders for this year’s Griffin Poetry Prize—which is announced on June 4th and comes with a cheque for C$130,000 ($94,000)—have produced poems with titles such as “Unregulated Waste Management Facility”. T.S. Eliot prizewinners offer titles including “the body as cemetery”. All are rich in words like “penumbra” and in unexpected italics. They are not rich in capital letters at the start of sentences. or jokes. or rhymes.
This is historically unusual. Poetry used to have rhyme and rhythm: the reason both words are hard to spell is that they derive from ancient Greek. The oldest recorded rhyme is from China in the 10th century BC. This ubiquity and longevity hint that the brain is “hardwired” to notice rhymes, says Samuel Jay Keyser, author of “Play it Again, Sam: Repetition in the Arts”, a new book. Other things reveal this too, such as the sheer ease with which you can detect rhymes in a text. A rhythm can be hard for you to see. That last sentence, for example, was in iambic pentameter, but you probably did not notice. Noticing rhyme in text is easier: if it’s got it, you can spot it.
You used to be able to spot it a lot. There were children’s rhymes and adult rhymes, larky rhymes and snarky rhymes that asked bombs to fall on Slough as “It isn’t fit for humans now.” There were sorrowful rhymes that told you not to “Go gentle into that good night”, but “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”.
Then rhyme collapsed. John Milton—a poet who influentially decided to forgo rhymes in his epic poem, “Paradise Lost”—inflicted an early blow. But it was the modernists who killed off rhyme.
At the start of the 19th century, around half the population was literate; by the start of the 20th, 97% was. This was good for egalitarianism but bad for intellectual egos, since poetry does not merely confer pleasure but status. In an era of low literacy the mere ability to read a poem set someone apart; as the era of mass literacy dawned, another marker of intellect was needed. It came in the form of modernism.
In the 20th century, many artforms became “more abstruse, inaccessible and difficult to appreciate”, says Steven Pinker, a professor at Harvard University, “possibly as a way of differentiating elites from the hoi polloi”. Any fool can enjoy an enjoyable thing, but only a committed intellectual can enjoy an unenjoyable one. By the mid-century, rhyming lines had fallen by half.
Modernist verse is thus the peacock’s tail of poetry: something that evolved to be clearly hard to bear, but impressive if you can. Consider the epigraph of T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece “The Waste Land”. It begins, forbiddingly, in Latin, then ends in ancient Greek with the words apothanein thelo (“I want to die”). Eliot can make everyone feel a bit like that.
Another possible cause of the decline is market forces—or their absence. Once, poets made money by selling poems: Lord Byron’s “The Corsair” shifted 10,000 copies in a day. Readers wanted rhymes, so poets provided them. But in the 20th century it became possible, as the poet Philip Larkin pointed out, to make a living less by poetry than “by being a poet”.
From bad to verse
Look at a list of recent winners of any of the big poetry prizes and most will share three characteristics: you will not have heard of them; their poems will not rhyme; and they will have worked as poets in universities, peddling poetry as (partially) state-subsidised muses. This is poetry less as a paid-for product than as a literary utility: something that—like road surfacing or sewage disposal—is widely considered necessary for a civilised society but that no one wants to fork out for.
The poetry that does sell is produced by a new generation of social-media poets such as Donna Ashworth and Rupi Kaur. This is to the distress of intellectuals, for Instapoets’ verse is not the gas-works and cemetery kind. It is designed to be shared online, meaning that it is anodyne and often accompanied by line drawings of birds.
Ms Ashworth prefers to write about nice things. She celebrates your “inner voice”, your “inner light” and your “inner child”—which may make many readers feel in touch with their inner breakfast. She warns readers not to listen to their “inner critic”. (Given some reviews, Ms Ashworth may prefer not to listen to outer ones either.) She reveres hope: put hope, she advises, “beside your car keys” lest you lose it.
Naturally such poems do not rhyme. For rhyme, alas, seems to have been almost entirely lost. Perhaps no one remembered to put it beside the car keys.
For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter
Copyright The Economist Intelligence Unit N.A., Incorporated

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I am probably going to have a lot to say about this later but I wanted to start by mentioning that rhyme had a decent run but the graph definitely cherry picks an era when rhyme has been deliberately falling out of fashion. 

Here is an article discussing the history of rhyme in English poetry

[wasellajam]

The poems that most people I know know my heart have both rhyme and meter and are set to music.

[milo]

I am agnostic about whether it is good or bad.  I do think the attempt at rhyme is responsible for most bad poetry.

I think I would like to address this point first.  I do not think the attempt at rhyme is responsible for most bad poetry.  I do think it makes it more apparent that a writer is producing bad poetry.  

I think free verse and the Confessional Movement democratized the creation of poetry to the point that everyone in the English world can produce poetry and the majority seem to share a belief that simply complaining about their lives in the the most mundane or prosaic way equates to poetry.

On the plus side, this has led to many more people interested in poetry but I would contend it has caused the production of more bad poetry than every other poetic movement combined.

Thanks

[busker]

The Wodehouse reference is from his Mulliner story a dodgy poet who is thrown out by his uncle, owner of Briggs Breakfast Pickles, for writing bad copy.

I think the question of rhyme in English had been dealt with extensively before and I’ve nothing new to add to what I’ve said before.

A more interesting question is, what does poetry today look like?
I read a smattering of modern poets here and there. I don’t mean Rupi Kaur, of course, and to say she’s a poet is to say that it doesn’t matter if you can do the Tour de France or just cycle about in the driveway, because bike riding is bike riding. Let the defenders of Rupi Kaur, though they don’t abound here, eat shite.

So what do I think of modern poetry? For one, it is exceptionally skilful. You have probably not heard of Eileen Chong, but she writes marvellously well: https://pittstreetpoetry.com/poet/eileen-chong/

And there are hundreds of Eileen Chong. Each one of them is a better poet than Tennyson or Wordsworth, and Browning is not fit to shine their shoes. But that’s also because they’ve developed on what came before, and we always look farther than the giants whose shoulders we stand upon.

Yet, there is a bland uniformity that pervades all modern poetry. I can tell Hopkins from Tennyson, but not Eileen Chong from many others. There is a sameness of voice. And this has to do with the death of religion and the death of magic. We live in an intellectual, scientific world. And the intellect is the enemy of poetry. So said Mahomet. No poets, he said, and then proceeded to seed his magnum opus with rhyme.

---

It’s a ramble, but I type on my phone and default to words that are easier to type or what the iOS dictionary throws out.

Religions is dead, and so is much of poetry. Somehow, the muttering of a single woman living in New York City about her period is not relevant when you think of the millions who died of cholera in the 1800s.

Or a man like Larkin, writing about how he is terrified of death, but then going on to brew his tea instead of fleeing to the mountains of Hira - all poetry today is pervaded with the same mock horror, mock sadness, phoney feeling.

Adonai roi, Lo echsar- that’s the root of all that’s good in western poetry, but it’s a home we can’t go back to. That’s good in an overall sense, but bad for the primitive art of poetry

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If I typed on a computer, I’d be able to explain my rants more cogently. I blame technology

[evanbedford_dot_com]

Excellent article. Thanks for sharing.
I think that free verse is for people in cloistered cliques. Rhyme and meter is for the common man/woman.
In 2024 Canada, this rhyme was burned into everyone's neurons: Axe the tax. (Just for the record, I despise Pierre Pollievre...but his rhyme was a very effective mnenomic in a nation of 40-odd million people).

[Quixilated]

Rhyme in poetry is like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's drawing of a "boa constrictor from the outside." People who have grown up often see only a disappointing hat. They have forgotten how to see the elephant.

[milo]

The Wodehouse reference is from his Mulliner story a dodgy poet who is thrown out by his uncle, owner of Briggs Breakfast Pickles, for writing bad copy.

I think the question of rhyme in English had been dealt with extensively before and I’ve nothing new to add to what I’ve said before.

A more interesting question is, what does poetry today look like?
I read a smattering of modern poets here and there. I don’t mean Rupi Kaur, of course, and to say she’s a poet is to say that it doesn’t matter if you can do the Tour de France or just cycle about in the driveway, because bike riding is bike riding. Let the defenders of Rupi Kaur, though they don’t abound here, eat shite.

So what do I think of modern poetry? For one, it is exceptionally skilful. You have probably not heard of Eileen Chong, but she writes marvellously well: https://pittstreetpoetry.com/poet/eileen-chong/

And there are hundreds of Eileen Chong. Each one of them is a better poet than Tennyson or Wordsworth, and Browning is not fit to shine their shoes. But that’s also because they’ve developed on what came before, and we always look farther than the giants whose shoulders we stand upon.

Yet, there is a bland uniformity that pervades all modern poetry. I can tell Hopkins from Tennyson, but not Eileen Chong from many others. There is a sameness of voice. And this has to do with the death of religion and the death of magic. We live in an intellectual, scientific world. And the intellect is the enemy of poetry. So said Mahomet. No poets, he said, and then proceeded to seed his magnum opus with rhyme.

---

It’s a ramble, but I type on my phone and default to words that are easier to type or what the iOS dictionary throws out.

Religions is dead, and so is much of poetry. Somehow, the muttering of a single woman living in New York City about her period is not relevant when you think of the millions who died of cholera in the 1800s.

Or a man like Larkin, writing about how he is terrified of death, but then going on to brew his tea instead of fleeing to the mountains of Hira - all poetry today is pervaded with the same mock horror, mock sadness, phoney feeling.

Adonai roi, Lo echsar- that’s the root of all that’s good in western poetry, but it’s a home we can’t go back to. That’s good in an overall sense, but bad for the primitive art of poetry

---

If I typed on a computer, I’d be able to explain my rants more cogently. I blame technology

This is actually a more interesting question and I had a bunch to say, but I actually have a bunch more to say about the rhyme in poetry as well.  I wish you had made a new thread out of this.  If you could, that would be appreciated.  I am still thinking about this.  The rant is excellent.  I love the Newton reference.

Thanks

[milo]

A friend posted this graph from an article in The Economist about the decline of rhyme in modern english poetry.  You will likely need a subscription to actually read the article, but I included it for those that do.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1D1nY5HDe8/

I am agnostic about whether it is good or bad.  I do think the attempt at rhyme is responsible for most bad poetry.

I searched the keywords and found this on Facebook:

=AZYe1CQUfz4kFS_LCXXfo0S1fmlkRKTdo9qjx9CZHgV7ltt4XzrveLRFINeU7uDc7JqxJUd4-QdXzbJ7SliJmUeKOdgbz06i1MTwuE9BJ-VapExe_OS4GFHez2wr81mDVpUKztgm9L53l3S8RaGtkpm7u7CmTEuXHQka6gqvJ4hLjQ&__tn__=R]-R]Poetry Festival Singapore


For Jeremy Bentham, a philosopher, poetry was simply writing that “fails” to reach the end of the line. For W.H. Auden, a poet, poetry was that which “makes nothing happen”. Arnold Bennett, a writer, disagreed: he thought poetry was very powerful. The mere word “poetry” could, he said, “scatter a crowd” faster than a firehose.
What unites these descriptions of poetry is that none uses the word “rhyme”.

This seems a targeted attack on rhyme.  None mentions meter, metaphor, anaphor, simile, assonance, etc either

When A.E. Housman, a poet, gave a 51-page lecture titled “The Name and Nature of Poetry” in 1933 he used the word “rhyme” just once, and then only in the phrase “bad rhyme”. Martin Heidegger, in an essay titled “What Are Poets For?” (1946) was similarly avoidant: the philosopher used the word “abyss” 16 times, “death” five—and rhyme not once.

This is because rhyme is a tool used in writing, none of the others are.  I didn't read the essay, but the assumption that people discussing some aspect about poetry and not mentioning rhyme means that rhyme is unimportant is a fallacy (fallacy of irrelevance, I believe)

View Image -
Poets rarely define poetry by whether or not it rhymes. This is just as well, for now it hardly does. P.G. Wodehouse, a novelist, divided poetry into the “old-fashioned kind with rhymes in it” and the modern stuff about “gas-works and decaying corpses”. The Economist’s analysis of 11,000 poems in English finds verse firmly in the gas-works and corpses camp. In 1900, 80% of poems contained rhyme; today, only around 25% do. Numbers of rhymes fell too: at the start of the 20th century over 60% of lines rhymed; now under 5% do (see chart). Rhyme, says Wendy Cope, a poet, has become “pretty unfashionable”.

While I cannot argue that rhyme has become unfashionable, The Economist doesn't give details on how or where it selected these poems.  Also, the arbitrary date breaks that don't even match each other suggests shenanigans with statistics.

Poetry’s most prestigious prizes bear that out. The contenders for this year’s Griffin Poetry Prize—which is announced on June 4th and comes with a cheque for C$130,000 ($94,000)—have produced poems with titles such as “Unregulated Waste Management Facility”. T.S. Eliot prizewinners offer titles including “the body as cemetery”. All are rich in words like “penumbra” and in unexpected italics. They are not rich in capital letters at the start of sentences. or jokes. or rhymes.
This is historically unusual. Poetry used to have rhyme and rhythm: the reason both words are hard to spell is that they derive from ancient Greek. The oldest recorded rhyme is from China in the 10th century BC. This ubiquity and longevity hint that the brain is “hardwired” to notice rhymes, says Samuel Jay Keyser, author of “Play it Again, Sam: Repetition in the Arts”, a new book. Other things reveal this too, such as the sheer ease with which you can detect rhymes in a text. A rhythm can be hard for you to see. That last sentence, for example, was in iambic pentameter, but you probably did not notice. Noticing rhyme in text is easier: if it’s got it, you can spot it.

Actually, this is almost exclusively with "end rhyme" though the author doesn't seem to notice this or call out the difference between end rhyme, internal rhyme, slant rhymes or assonance.

You used to be able to spot it a lot. There were children’s rhymes and adult rhymes, larky rhymes and snarky rhymes that asked bombs to fall on Slough as “It isn’t fit for humans now.” There were sorrowful rhymes that told you not to “Go gentle into that good night”, but “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”.
Then rhyme collapsed. John Milton—a poet who influentially decided to forgo rhymes in his epic poem, “Paradise Lost”—inflicted an early blow. {/quote]

Paradise Lost was published in 1667.  Rhyme in English poetry mostly became fashionable with Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales which was published around 1400.  This means Paradise Lost was published right around the mid point of the popularity of English Rhyme and BEFORE The Victorians and Romantics who really popularized rhyme@


/snip

I am going to leave here for now.  

Thanks