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59 Cornucopia, or, Contemporary American Rhyme Stephen Burt as a proportion of all published verse, fewer American poems use rhyme, and even fewer use forms that require end-rhymes, than wasthecasethirty—nevermind,eighty—yearsago.Iwanttoshow not exactly why that happened, but what that change means for how we hear rhyme and for how it gets used, in the United States, by the most interesting poets who use it now. (My argument does not apply to the contemporary poets of Britain and Ireland, though the terms I define might help you thinkabouttheirpoemstoo.)Ihopeyou’llforgivemeforstartinglongago and far away: I’ll get contemporary, and American, as soon as I can. Rhyme used to be the norm: it came into English as a norm, along XJUIBMPUPG'SFODIXPSET JOUIFDSPTTDIBOOFMFYDIBOHFTUIBUBMTPDSFBUFE Middle English. Since rhyme was a “modern,” Continental, vernacular device, Renaissance classicizers wrote against it, either seriously or satirJDBMMZ BTJO#FO+POTPOTi"'JUPG3IZNF"HBJOTU3IZNFw Greek was free from rhyme’s infection, Happy Greek by this protection Was not spoiled. Whilst the Latin, queen of tongues, Is not yet free from rhyme’s wrongs, But rests foiled. 60 Cornucopia / Stephen Burt The Monkey and the Wrench The joke would be no joke unless we expected that poems in English, in general, in Jonson’s day, would rhyme: we lose track of the fact that it rhymes, until the poem reminds us, over and over, by telling us that it should not. The effect is like hearing somebody giving a speech in favor of nudism, but refusing to take off his clothes: rhyme that would otherwise stay near the background moves, once we understand the sense, to the front. John Milton defended the absence of rhyme from Paradise Lost—that is, he thought its absence required defense: “The measure is English heroic verse without rhyme,” he wrote, as that of Homer in Greek and of Virgil in Latin; rhyme being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age....This neglect then of rhyme so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be esteemed an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming. “Ancient liberty” meant Greece and Rome, but also England before UIF/PSNBODPORVFTU XIFO'SBODPQIPOFJOWBEFSTTVQQPTFEMZCSPVHIU absolute monarchy, along with end-rhyme, to the island. Neither import, by Milton’s day, looked much like its Continental form: English has many more word endings, hence fewer instances for a given rhyme. Yet English did find structures, standardized forms, that competent poets could replicate without strain: couplets and quatrains, separately or in combination, became so common that they could pass almost without notice as poets emphasized effects other than rhyme. Here is the first quatrain from Shakespeare’s sonnet 1: 'SPNGBJSFTUDSFBUVSFTXFEFTJSFJODSFBTF That thereby beauty’s rose might never die, But as the riper should by time decease, His tender heir might bear his memory. Rhyme highlights the rhymed words, if only because all verse lines highlight their end words. If you ask why Shakespeare used these rhymes, you can find answers (“increase” anticipates, and counters, “decease”; disyllables balance the monosyllabic “die”). But that might not be the Cornucopia / Stephen Burt 61 Essays into Contemporary Poetics first question you’re likely to ask—and if you memorize, or recite, the passage, or compare it with other sonnets from Shakespeare’s day, the fact that it rhymes is not going to loom large: rather, quatrain rhyme helps establish the norm against which other verbal effects stand out. $BMMJUCBDLHSPVOESIZNF'SPN$IBVDFSUP4IBLFTQFBSFUPUIF eighteenth century, and for many poets until our own time, rhyme was an element in the “metrical contract,” the agreement that poets would deliver a language more tightly organized (and therefore more memorable ) than conversation and discursive prose, but the individual rhymes, as rhymes, would not usually draw more attention than other aspects of the verse. Pope’s Essay on Criticism praised mimetic effects drawn from rhythm and from consonance—“the sound must seem an echo to the sense,” as when speedy lines depicted a speedy goddess. But when he discussed rhymes, he praised no special effects they could generate. Instead...

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