Rhyming Wars

Published in the Guardian Saturday Review, Commentary, August 2006

Poetic form rouses strange passions. Even at the Royal Society of Literature, poets can be heckled for their views on it. At Ledbury Poetry Festival someone demanded his money back from all the events he had been to because he missliked a poem. But of all aspects of verse writing, rhyme provokes the most ire.

Rhyme is only one among many ways in which poetry does its job of satisfying the ear and the understanding while getting words to belong together. But in England it is the perennial rallying flag for people claiming to “stand up” for tradition by not reading much modern poetry. Italian poets invented the sonnet but their counterparts today do not get protested at as, last month at Ledbury, Jo Shapcott, Sean O’ Brien and I did (currently the Poetry Society’s President, Vice President and Chair), on the grounds that the Poetry Society supports the wrong sort of poetry: poetry that does not rhyme. 

A sandwich board was involved in the protest, a straw hat covered in paper flowers, and a new political party which says all English poetry should rhyme.

We were thinking of other things, reading for an event called “Naming Your Place”. It turns out that naming places has surprising power in poetry. Since Homer, poems have names the sites of battles, births, disasters, cities, journeys. Ledbury was the perfect venue.  John Masefield and (probably) the seventeenth-century mystic Thomas Traherne were born there. Robert Frost lived there in 1914. Edward Thomas wrote “Addlestrop” about a train journey to visit Frost there, then joined him, and other Ledbury poets (like John Drinkwater, Eleanor Farjeon), exploring the countryside with Frost. Frost wrote his famous poem “The Road Not Taken” about those walks, partly because Thomas always dithered about the route but really because he wanted Thomas, then a critic, to write poems. Underneath “The Road Not Taken” is Frost’s encouragement of Thomas to write poetry, which he did from 1914 in Ledbury, until his death in France, April 1917. A war later, to save her from the Nazis, Auden married Thomas Mann’s daughter in Ledbury’s Town Hall.

So a sudden heckle about rhyme took us by surprise, especially since a lot of today’s poetry does, in fact, rhyme. The summer issue of Poetry Review was also launched at Ledbury Poetry Festival. It opens with two rhymed sonnets by Don Paterson, includes another by Jacob Polley, a rhymed poem by George Szirtes, poems by Elaine Feinstein and Andrew Motion whose end-rhymes delicately interact with internal rhymes, and poems by Matthew Sweeney. Moniza Alvi and John Burnside, among many others, which integrate internal rhyme with other ways of getting syllables to belong together: which is the basis of all good poetry.

Good poetry published in Britain today is immensely various in form and content. Poets use rhyme all the time: half-rhyme, internal rhyme, broken rhyme, leonine rhyme, chain rhyme, random rhyme, and vowels echoing intimately from inside one line across to the next.
   Too bad: the real rallying flag for the rhyme police is end-rhyme in a rhyming scheme.

This battle, though, was fought four hundred years ago by cutting-edge practitioners while Shakespeare was writing and blank verse, begun in English around 1540 (following Italy’s versi sciolti da rima, “verse freed from rhyme”, developed roughly 1530), was blazing out of the language.
   In 1602, Thomas Campion attacked “the unaptnesse of Rime in Poesie”. Bad poets, he said, “rime a man to death”. The “popularitie of Rime creates as many Poets as a hot summer flies.” Rhyme should be used “sparingly, lest it offend the eare with tedious affectation”.

Samuel Daniel wrote furiously back “proving“, he said, “that Rhyme is the fittest harmonie of words that comportes with our Language”. Campion, this traitor to rhyme, has called “our measures grosse, vulgare, barbarous.” If it be so, Daniel snarled sarcastically, “we have lost much labour to no purpose.” Ben Jonson weighed in with a satirical poem, “A Fit of Rime against Rime”, accusing rhyme of “Wresting words from their true calling, / Propping verse for fear of falling;” of “Jointing syllables, drowning letters,/ Fastening vowels as with fetters.”

The nub of Campion’s protest was laziness and banality. It is fatally easy to rhyme badly. If you rhyme, it had better be fresh, better be good. Otherwise it doesn’t just spoil your poem, it betrays rhyme itself. Milton was against it. Rhyme acts on poets, he said, as “a constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse, than else they would have exprest them.” Paradise Lost does not end-rhyme, nor much Tennyson, Wordsworth’s Prelude and Excursion, or most of Shakespeare’s plays. “As soon as lazy thou” (Jonson says to “rime”) “wert known/ All good poetry hence was flown.”

It was an important quarrel, then. T. S, Eliot said it produced some of England’s greatest poetry. Today (like Tennyson, Milton, Wordsworth, Shakespeare), many poets end-rhyme in some poems but not others. Good poets who consistently end-rhyme tend to be either satirical or very subtle; or else work in a rap-like genre. Such as the Poetry Slambassadors, supported (it happens) by the Poetry Society. 

Art forms move forward or they die. Live tradition is the opposite of copying. The people today who really “stand up for tradition”, who love past poets and want poetry to go on living, are good poets developing the tradition in divergent voices and forms. Today’s music, said Daniel Barenboem in his Reith Lectures, could not exist without the music of the past. The Poetry Society’s series of events “Under the Influence” explores the live influence of dead poets on modern ones. So does Faber’s One on One series. 

Those early rhyming wars settled into the English compromise that rhyme was not essential to poetry but very important to it. This is still true. So why the strop? Because, as André Gide pointed out, “Everything has been said before. But since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning again.”  
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The rhyming wars of the seventeenth century, and the more popular aspect of modern ones in the UK, are explored in s bit mroe depth in Part One of THE POEM AND THE JOURNEY, and the Introduction to 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem. Ssee under "Books".