Decline of rhyme in 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”.

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)

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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