To rhyme or not to rhyme... that is the question!

tomasocarthaigh

There is a very elitieist movement in the country with a quite negative view on rhyming poetry. As a forum that has many members of the ordinary Irish man and woman, as opposed to the college crowd, do you think that poetry should be rhyming or not?

While personally I am a fanatic for rhyme, I often abandon other forms of poetic boundaries such as meter regularity, but I see the rhyme in all poetry - bar of course haiku and derivative forms - as the basic fence or foundation in poetry.

Whichever tradition that we come from, Gaelic, Scot or Anglo, all our writers have produced their most memorable work in rhyme. While a fair few dabbled in free verse and prose poetry and suchlike, the likes of Orr, and Fergusson (Ulster Scots), Moore and Yeats (Anglo Irish), Pearse, Kavanagh and the Irish language poets wrote their best stuff in rhyme.

However, beauty may be in the eye or ear of the reader as much as the writer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHeL2kzG9wo

Denerick

I dont care. Whose round is it? (I will care if you buy me a pint!)

I don't see the issue. Poetry doesn't need to conform to any kind of structural homogenity; if it accomplishes the task of saying the unsayable with mere words, who cares if it rhymes or not?

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Eliot Rosewater

tomasocarthaigh wrote: »

There is a very elitieist movement in the country with a quite negative view on rhyming poetry.

Is this the same movement that trumps the following experimental, erm, "poetry" as the height of human achievement?

loop of wire thru
co-implications
meters long
recording
reorders
the step
aside
backlighting
changes
Lothal gloss
cover
with the day
of the week
left whole
patch
unsettled claims
stood up
to compose
malarial floats
of all visual
approach
fish hooks
poured into

(Some people consider this kind of thing profound.)

Earthhorse

I put my hat upon my head
And went into the strand.
There I met another man
Whose hat was in his hand.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

sron

tomasocarthaigh wrote: »

There is a very elitieist movement in the country with a quite negative view on rhyming poetry. As a forum that has many members of the ordinary Irish man and woman, as opposed to the college crowd, do you think that poetry should be rhyming or not?

While personally I am a fanatic for rhyme, I often abandon other forms of poetic boundaries such as meter regularity, but I see the rhyme in all poetry - bar of course haiku and derivative forms - as the basic fence or foundation in poetry.

Whichever tradition that we come from, Gaelic, Scot or Anglo, all our writers have produced their most memorable work in rhyme. While a fair few dabbled in free verse and prose poetry and suchlike, the likes of Orr, and Fergusson (Ulster Scots), Moore and Yeats (Anglo Irish), Pearse, Kavanagh and the Irish language poets wrote their best stuff in rhyme.

However, beauty may be in the eye or ear of the reader as much as the writer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHeL2kzG9wo

Given that we had great poetry for so long without it, I don't see how rhyme is foundational. It seems, too, that distaste for rhyme is nothing new:

The Measure is English Heroic Verse without Rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin; Rime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter; grac't indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried away by Custom...
-John Milton

Valmont

I dont care. Whose round is it? (I will care if you buy me a pint!)

I don't mind if it doesn't rhyme but I really don't like experimental non-poetry- in the same way I have no time for the paintings like this. It's like Stephen Fry said: people strangely think they can ignore the modes and conventions of poetry but how would you feel if someone sat down at a piano and did the same thing?

Valmont

I dont care. Whose round is it? (I will care if you buy me a pint!)

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

loop of wire thru
co-implications
meters long
recording
reorders
the step
aside
backlighting
changes
Lothal gloss
cover
with the day
of the week
left whole
patch
unsettled claims
stood up
to compose
malarial floats
of all visual
approach
fish hooks
poured into

You really need the annotated version to get what's going on.

tomasocarthaigh

No, it depends on the flow of the sound when reading as opposed to the rhyme.

@ sron... thanks for the Milton quote... this debate is going on longer than we realise!

The rhyme in poetry was not always there true, as in Greek and Roman, but in Irish and indeed in Chinese poetry, it has been an integral part.

As for our friend Milton, he would have viewed Irish culture in his day as barbaric, as was the spirit of the times.

However, it was to be adapted in his culture, as well as north of the Scottish border, and the Anglo Irish in the Celtic Dawn period, and the Romantic one before it really brought it to the fore.

It was always part of the Gaelic culture, along with a very difficult metre system.

Modern rhyming poetry as in the poems written by ordinary people as opposed to the educated - all too often lost to us now - has died a death with the advancement of modern communications and the current control of the literary scene by the modernists.

Asking amny ordinary people, they say they hate poetry as they cannot realte to it. On asking - and this is anecdotal, true enough - as to what would make poetry more relevent to the ordinary people, rhyme is the most common thing said to me.

In my view, while horse and cart allowed mankind to travel for centuries (non rhyming poetry in our debate), the advancement of the motor car (rhyming poetry) brought the golden age of transport (poetry).

Now people say that we should go back to the horse and cart, as they find driving boring (back to non rhyming as rhyming is boring).

I hope I dont confuse too much in the example given!!!

KnifeWRENCH

I dont care. Whose round is it? (I will care if you buy me a pint!)

"Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Some poems rhyme,
This one doesn't"

I don't think rhyme should ever be a prerequisite tio writing a poem, or an excuse to try and make poetry more "accessible". It all depends on the aural/lyrical flow of the poem; no point disrupting it for the sake of inserting rhyming words into it.

Incidentally, I don't mind experimental "non-poetry"; then again, I am admittedly quite pretentious when it comes to experimental anything! :pac:

longshanks

it seems artists are all prepared to suffer for their work, but why are so few prepared to learn to draw.

i got that out of a banksy book, but to me its a valid point and can probably applied to anything

metrovelvet

tomasocarthaigh wrote: »

Whichever tradition that we come from, Gaelic, Scot or Anglo, all our writers have produced their most memorable work in rhyme. While a fair few dabbled in free verse and prose poetry and suchlike, the likes of Orr, and Fergusson (Ulster Scots), Moore and Yeats (Anglo Irish), Pearse, Kavanagh and the Irish language poets wrote their best stuff in rhyme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHeL2kzG9wo

That is often the point of rhyme, is so it is easier to remember. I appreciate some rhyming poetry, but I also appreciate a lot of other poetry that does not use rhyme.

That's the beauty of variety. It's not either/or. It's both/and.

--Kaiser--

I do like rhyme in poetry but it's not essential, more important is metre, rhythm and general flow of the lines. Placing sentences in verse form does not a poem make.

Nor does
placing them in
thus
style
like
concrete poetry

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Enkidu

I realise this post is a little old, but I just wanted to comment on something in it.

tomasocarthaigh wrote: »

The rhyme in poetry was not always there true, as in Greek and Roman, but in Irish and indeed in Chinese poetry, it has been an integral part.

Irish poetry doesn't have a tradition of rhyming. In fact the Bards found direct rhyme to be vulgar and common. Although there was a quality to the poems that is called rhyme (comardad), it would not count as rhyme to an English speaker. To quote David Stifter of the University of Vienna:

David Stifter wrote:

To modern ears [the comardad] sometimes gives the impression that no rhyme is involved at all in classical Irish poems, but then Old Irish filid (Bards/Poets) would probably find our modern compositions extremely boring.