On Rhyme Out Now!

Rejoice! David Caplan has edited a collection of essays called On Rhyme, with contributions from a host of interesting people. Here's the table of contents:

Rhyme in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

Stephen Burt – Cornucopia, or, Contemporary American Rhyme
Robert Archambeau – Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Rhyme in Contemporary American Poetry
Maureen N. McLane – Divigations on Rhyme: For Rhyme, or Rhyme
Roi Tartakovsky – Rhyme Random: Robert Creeley's Sporadic Rhymes.

Rhyme Across Time Periods

Simon Jarvis – Why Rhyme Pleases
Anthony Madrid – Seventeen Quotations with Commentary.

Rhyme in Earlier Poetry

Christina Pugh – Emily Dickinson, Rhyme, and Sonic Ambivalence
Michael C. Clody – The Matter of Rhyme in Tudor Poetics
Peter McDonald – Boundaries and Ways between: Rhyme and the Hermetic
David Scott Wilson-Okamura – Spenser's Drone.

Poetry Portfolio

Charles Bernstein – "Fare Thee Well" and "What Makes a Poem a Poem?"
Maureen N. McLane – "On Not Being Elizabethan"
Jennifer Moxley – "The Bittersweet Echo" and "The Poetry Lesson"
Albert Goldbarth – "Migration Song"
Michael Robbins – “Sonnets to Edward Snowden”

Hip Hop and Rhyme

Natalie Gerber – Stress vs. Syllable Timing: Global Englishes, Rhyme, and Rap
David Caplan – The Inheritors of Hip Hop: Reclaiming Rhyme

Rhyme in Other Texts

H.L. Hix – Identical Rhyme and Multiplicity of Identity
Marjorie Perloff – Afterward: What the Ear Demands.

Anthony Madrid's Defense of Rhyme

You want to know about rhyme, you ask Anthony Madrid.  Trust me on this.  Here's the beginning of his new essay, "A Gallery of Rhymes from Palgrave's Golden Treasury," the latest installment in the "Essays & Commentary" section I edit for Plume: 

Spring, the sweet Spring, is the year's pleasant king;

Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,

Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing, 

Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

This is the first stanza of a short poem by Thomas Nash. I have “bolded” the rhyme words, as I shall be doing throughout these notes.

The poem first appeared in Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592), a play that no one has read in hundreds of years. The poem occurs near the beginning of the play. It is a song.

There is another poem from Summer’s Last Will that is more famous nowadays, I mean the one with the refrain “I am sick, I must die. / Lord have mercy on us.” Naturally, it occurs at the end of the play.

“I am sick, I must die” did not make it into Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. “Spring, the sweet spring” did. Nothing else by Nash is in there. However, it was used as the first poem on page 1. “Book First,” first poem: “Spring, the sweet spring.”

It was a bold choice. It only has one good line in it. However, that line is repeated three times in thirteen lines: “Cuckoo, jug-jug,” etc. Palgrave and the other people on his secret committee (which included Tennyson), had no doubts about this piece.

Forget the good line. Look at the rhymes. At least two things worth commenting on. Number one, the fact that you get not a rhyme pair but a rhyme hexagon. That’s not common. Number two, it’s not an equilateral hexagon. What do I mean by that.

I mean the status of the words sting and ring is quite inferior to that of spring, king, thing, and sing. Look in any concordance to any lyrical poet’s works. You’ll find the words sting and ring are not used as rhymes with anywhere near the frequency that the other four are.

Your concordance will also show that the rhyme pair {spring|sing} beats any other combination of those six words, probably by a factor of ten-to-one. The reason is obvious, we needn’t get into it.

The crazy thing is: If you rank the words by frequency, you’ll find the “pecking order” is more or less the same among poets born in the same generation. This is because lyric poets are a bunch of brainless babblers, just as we ourselves are. They want more than anything else for their song or poem to sound like a song or a poem, and so they are forced by powers larger than themselves to say things like “Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king.” It can’t be helped.

But I’m about to say something very important. There was nothing wrong in 1592, and there is nothing wrong in 2017, with using the same rhyme pairs over and over and over. You can call {sing|spring} a “rhyme cliché” if you want, but that attitude leads to flushing six sevenths of world literature down the toilet. 

More on this hereafter.

Hereafter begins here, where the whole essay can be found. 

What Rhymes with Wallace?: Wallace Stevens and Rhyme

One of the unexpected pleasures of the recent Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, for me, was running across Anthony Madrid in the corridors between sessions.  I hadn’t seen him for months, not since he pressed a collection of Edward Lear’s verse into my hands in a tiny used bookstore under the Metra tracks in Evanston, and was glad to let him pull me into a nearby room where he was about to join other members of the Wallace Stevens Society in a panel on Stevens and rhyme.

Madrid spoke first, beginning with a general précis of his argument about the trajectory of rhyme in English verse.  I’d heard this before, when Madrid joined Don Share and Lea Graham on a panel on the poetry of Michael Robbins I chaired at the Midwest MLA a year ago, but it’s such an intriguing argument I was happy to hear it rehearsed again.  The gist of it is that after the Elizabethan period, whole categories of rhyme are, essentially, decommissioned from English verse, or become far less common (critics of Madrid’s theory love to find exceptions, but a full reading of his doctoral work in The Warrant for Rhyme reveals a strong case for a general trend of the kind he describes).  Rhymes that involve strong semantic links—semantic similarities, or opposites, or rhymes from the same semantic category—greatly diminish over the course of the seventeenth century.  So me/thee, mine/thine, he/she, berry/cherry, and the like become far less common.  Madrid makes much of this: the link between rhymes becomes less rational, he says, and more a matter of mystery, as if the poet wills the rhyming words to belong together for reasons unknowable to the intellect.

The anti-semantic nature of rhyme becomes a norm in the eighteenth century, and it is only with Thomas Percy’s 1765 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, an antiquarian’s selection of old ballads and other poems, that the older style of rhyme begins to return for the Romantic era.  A Romantic like Byron, when he is serious, as in Childe Harold, rhymes like an eighteenth century poet, but when he’s comic, as in Don Juan or Beppo, he makes rhymes that go out of their way to draw attention to themselves, and appear as stunts (as Butler’s comic rhymes in Hubridas did).  The rhyme becomes something deliberately original, frame-breaking and winking.  And this sounds the death-knell for rhyme, since over the nineteenth century rhyme becomes less a holistic part of poems and more of an attention-grabbing device, until in the modern era it is all-but abandoned.

This brings us to Wallace Stevens, whose poetry only rarely rhymes—11 early poems are consistently rhymed, and after that rhyme occurs as an occasional grace, like alliteration.  When it does rhyme, it almost always uses the classical rhyme of the eighteenth century, which does not seek to draw attention to its cleverness (an exception being “übermenschlichkeit/ word soon come right”).  There is rarely a semantic quality to the rhyme, and Madrid argues that this is aligned with Stevens’ belief in the mysterious powers of the imagination—the rhymes are convened only by the power of imagination, not on some rationally apprehensible basis.  Stevens rhymes less and less over time, too, as the poetry becomes less overtly musically-driven and more liturgical.

After Madrid, Eugene Vydrin of NYU took the stage to speak about rhyme and the adherence of the poem to reality in Stevens, and was followed by Joon Soo-Bong of Seoul National University, who spoke about schematic rhyme as essentially antithetical to Stevens’ aesthetic of flow.  All very interesting, but I was particularly fascinated by Roi Tartakovsky, who turned to empirical linguistic research to explain rhymes and other sonic effects in Stevens’ poetry. 

Tartakovsky noted that one of the most important recurring patterns in Stevens’ poetry is that of the recurrent pair of sonically similar words—as in the “sea” and “she” that come up at the start of the first and second stanzas of “The Idea of Order at Key West.”  Linguists have told us that acoustically similar words are actually less well reproduced in the memory than other words, and tend to become confused—but that rhyme words are, in fact, remembered well.  So Stevens works with a combination of words that aid in the recollection of argument or thesis, and words that actually blur rational or argumentative distinctions.  I’d be very interested in seeing a fully-worked out analysis of Stevens drawing on this insight.

Of course there was much more to see and hear (and eat and drink and argue over) at the conference, but I’m glad I was pulled into the little demimonde of the Stevensians, and I’m glad to see rhyme returning as a category of serious critical analysis.

Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Contemporary Rhyme in Poetry

The latest issue of the Spoon River Poetry Review is out, and contains my essay "Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Rhyme in Contemporary Poetry."  Some very talented people have been writing in rhyme lately, both in and well outside the old 'New Formalist' movement.  And they've been rhyming in vastly different ways (I look at Michael Robbins, Amanda Smletz, R.S. Gwynn, and Ben Mazer).  Moreover, some very bright people have been thinking about the meaning and history of rhyme.  The essay begins by examining what two of these people—Stephen Burt and Anthony Madrid—have to say.  Here's how the essay opens:


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Rhyme, argues Milton, defending the blank verse of Paradise Lost, is "no necessary adjunct or true ornament of a poem… but the invention of a barbarous age," and the poet's freedom from rhyme is "an ancient liberty recovered… from the troublesome modern bondage of rhyming." Times have changed: try thinking of a contemporary poet who has felt the need to defend the lack of rhyme in his or her poetry and odds are pretty strong you'll come up blank. Indeed, it's the rhymers who are more likely to feel the need for a defense. The best defense, of course, is a good poem in rhyme—and if we look, we begin to find these in many different quadrants of the poetry world.

But there are rhymes and there are rhymes, and it's worthwhile considering what some of the recent scholarship has to say about the differences between them, especially if we hope to understand the various ends to which contemporary poets have put rhyme. Perhaps it's not coincidental that the most provocative critical thoughts about rhyme in recent years have come from poets, notably Stephen Burt and Anthony Madrid.

Burt looks at rhyme primarily in terms of its function, making a general distinction between what he calls “background” and “foreground” rhymes. For most of the history of rhymed poetry in English, Burt writes in his essay “Cornucopia, or Contemporary American Rhyme,” rhymes were not meant to pull focus away from other elements of the poem. Rhyme was one element in the “metrical contract,” an agreement between poets and readers that poems would be more tightly organized and musical than prose. Individual rhymes, though, “would not usually draw more attention than other aspects of the verse.” Indeed: they were part of a norm—a background—against which deviations became more visible. They were the settings in which verbal gems were placed, not the gems themselves. When they were too ingenious—or, alternately, too worn and cloying—they pulled focus and failed to serve their vital if unglamorous function. Burt cites Robert Graves’ analogy between good rhymes and good servants as an example of this theory of rhyme’s function: good rhymes, says Graves, “are the good servants whose presence at the dinner-table gives the guest a sense of opulent security; never awkward or over-clever… You can trust them not to interrupt the conversation.” Rhyming “moon” with “June,” in this view, is much like spilling a bowl of soup in a diner’s lap; while rhyming “intellectual” with “hen-pecked you all” is more a matter of spending far too long explaining the choice of appetizer, or making an unctuous compliment about the diner’s choice of necktie.

When rhyme forces itself onto our attention, it pushes itself into the foreground. The move may be propelled by all sorts of different fuel: rhymes may jump forward “because they are polysyllabic, because they employ proper nouns… because the words they use are the oddest in their respective lines” or for any number of other reasons. What matters is that it demands attention: rather than being part of an accepted contract, it comes across as a violation of some kind, making the verse seem “consciously artificial—ornamental, or antiquary, or ironic (even sarcastic), or willed, or faux-naïve.” Most of you wouldn’t want this kind of rhyme serving you dinner on a big night out, though you’d probably enjoy it as a cabaret performer.

A contract, of course, has two parties, and Burt’s theory of rhyme isn’t so much about the qualities of rhymes in isolation, but about the way they interact with readerships. The percentage of published American poems that rhyme is smaller than it was even a few decades ago —fewer and fewer readers take rhyme as a norm—with the result that it is harder and harder for rhyme to fulfill a background function. Foreground rhyme, therefore, “has become, for most American poets now, the only kind that we can use: its possibilities have expanded immensely, while background rhyme has become, though not unheard of, scarce, and extremely hard to use well.”

While Burt focuses on the function of rhyme in a shifting context, Anthony Madrid gives us a bold, broad history of English rhyme. In “Warrant for Rhyme” he tells a story of rhyme’s transformation from the Renaissance to the present day, centering on a “rhyme shift” that quietly remade English poetry over the course of the seventeenth century. Before this shift, we find a much greater emphasis on rhymes that bear a sematic resemblance as well as a sonic one: “cherry” and “berry,” for example, or “mother” and “brother.” After the shift, though, such rhymes occur with greatly reduced frequency. By 1660 or so, Madrid argues,

 …serious poets unconsciously resisted using rhyme pairs wherein the two words bore to each other any strong and essential semantic link. This resistance sometimes reached a pitch of utter exclusion in cases where the words in the rhyme pair were perceived on some level as participating in a semantic algebra of equivalence or opposition… whole categories of rhyme were decommissioned. In particular, rhyme pairs wherein the words are near-synonyms or near-antonyms were to be avoided. Thus, {moan | groan} would have been counterintuitive to an Augustan poet, because the two terms are near-synonyms. {Sad | glad} would have seemed undesirable because the words are opposites.

Since the move away from semantic/sonic combinations in rhyme happens in poetic practice without ever becoming the subject of a manifesto-like polemical essay in the period, the rationale remains evasive, although Madrid advances a hypothesis that we might take as a description of the birth of what Burt calls background rhyme. “[T]he implied purpose of rhyme” after the shift, says Madrid, “was to affect the audience in the same way that music does: not by encoding information, but by manipulating the sensual apparatus of the body." The hypothesis, then, is that poets sought “ to exclude rhymes they expected would call attention to themselves, thus disturbing the operation of the music.”

For Madrid, this system began to break down in the nineteenth century, beginning with the comic masterpieces of Lord Byron. In Byron we see the first poet to work, not intermittently or marginally, but in his great works quite consistently, with rhymes that willfully violate the norms of decorum. He does so not by turning back the clock to the Renaissance emphasis on semantically significant rhymes, but by turning to a kind of rhyme that insistently “demonstrates inventiveness and originality.”

This turn to eccentricity prepared the ground for the diminished role of rhyme in modern poetry. The flashy virtuosity of Byronic rhyme inevitably led the reader to ask, “Are not all these crazy rhymes a joke on poetry itself?” The ultimate effect of Byron and those he influenced was to help undermine the old contract about rhyme between poet and reader, giving us a “demotion of rhyme from an effect that characterized a given poem as a whole to a local and unpredictable effect whose pretensions to power were sharply limited.” We find ourselves in the world of Burt’s foreground rhymers, with rhyme coming across as artificial, ornamental, willed, ironic, or faux-naïve. Madrid laments this situation, claiming that while rhyme culture never disappeared among songwriters, in literary poetry rhyme will, in the absence of some champion, “languish in a perpetual catarrh, and students of English poetry will have to strain hard to lend half of our greatest poets the sympathetic ear they deserve.” “When, oh when,” Madrid seems to call out in the wilderness, “will the covenant be revived?”

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Well, it goes on, with readings of recent work by of R.S. Gwynn, Michael Robbins, Amanda Smeltz, and Ben Mazer, who employ different types of rhymes to different ends for different audiences.  At the moment, the essay is only available in the print version of the Spoon River Poetry Review (39.2, winter 2014) but the online version should be available soon.

"Imagine That Happening Again in Poetry": The Future and History of Rhyme

Anthony Madrid (right) with Michael Robbins and Stephanie Anderson

It is, of course, a debatable proposition that Anthony Madrid's paper on rhyme at the recent Midwest Modern Language Association conference is the most exciting thing to come out of Milwaukee since the introduction of the Harley-Davidson Fat Boy in 1990, but I'm inclined to believe it is just that.  Indeed, in combination with another paper on rhyme by Robert Strong of Bates College, Madrid's paper led me to revise my sense of literary history.

Madrid came to Milwaukee to speak on a panel I'd organized on the poetry of Michael Robbins.  He joined Don Share of Poetry magazine, who spoke about the controversy that surrounds much of Robbins' work, and Lea Graham of Marist College, who spoke of capitalism and commercialism as influences on both the form and content of Robbins' poetry.  Madrid took a long view, and arrived at Robbins only after giving a précis of his University of Chicago doctoral dissertation on the history of English rhyme from the sixteenth century on.  What he revealed was, to the best of my knowledge, and entirely original and convincing theory on the evolution of rhyme, and a hint at the direction in which it may be going in English language poetry.

The story begins with the surprising frequency, in the Elizabethan period, with which rhyme words occur with particular kinds of semantic elements: rhymes that are not merely aural, but linked in certain kinds of elementary dyads, especially opposites like he/she or me/thee or ever/never, say, or hither/thither.  Synonyms are also common rhyme pairs in the period, as are pairings with a genus-species link (cherry/berry) or that come in one way or another from the same category (mother/brother, say, as a kinship pairing).  The idea was to combine semantic similarity with sonic similarity.

The striking thing is that these whole categories of rhyme begin to disappear, or become greatly diminished, in the Stuart period (Madrid's diligence over the course of several years in counting rhyme words is to be commended and honored, and perhaps also pitied just a little, in the way we might pity Milton's study-bound scholar in "Il Penseroso").  The disappearances happen without being theorized: there are no manifestoes or treatises condemning such rhymes, but the change is real and clear and empirically there.  Semantically significant rhyme becomes greatly reduced, and a new form or rhyming becomes the norm.  This new form is sonic or aural first, says Madrid, and seeks to be a kind of climate of background sound, a white noise or a lulling drug.  It does not wish to draw attention to itself by making a clever semantic parallel to the rhyme's sonic element.  Rather,  it wishes to go by as something felt but unmarked.  Mother/brother or hither/thither fade to be replaced by the kind of rhyme we in our time deprecate as mediocre or banal—moon/June and the like.  This is not to say that such rhymes, with their refusal to forefront any kind of semantic cleverness, are bad—although I heard papers at the same conference where Madrid spoke that asserted just that, as if there were transhistorical truths about rhyme, unbound by any historically contingent aesthetics.

The kind of rhyme that came to prominence in the Stuart era and lasted throughout the Augustan period fell from fashion with the Romantics and has not returned to fashion since (though it persists, of course, in many popular forms—wedding verse, greeting card verse, and other forms despised by the literati).  The Romantic transformation of rhyme drew inspiration, in England, from Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, that great rag-bag of popular song and balladry.  The transformation is most visible in the works of Lord Byron.  Byron, after all, was a great lover of the Augustans, and much of his poetry partakes of an Augustan form of rhyme.  But when he leaves off the seriousness of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage for the comedy of Don Juan, Byron lets loose with a new virtuosity in rhyme.  Instead of letting rhyme be unobtrusive, he juices it up, and makes us notice it for its originality, striking newness, and cleverness: "But oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual/Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all" is the most famous case of dozens, even hundreds, of virtuoso rhymes from Don Juan alone.  Rhyme, in the new dispensation, is to be about flash and dazzle and cleverness, and you are meant to notice it, as you had not generally been meant to notice it in the Augustan paradigm.  The new rhyme differs, too, from the old Elizabethan form, since it does not necessarily seek some kind of semantic parallel to the sound echo.  It is about startling freshness, however that might be found.

The trouble with this new kind of rhyme, Madrid says, is that it can, if established as a tradition, become tedious—especially when handled by pens less deft than that of Byron.  So rhyme falls from literary fashion almost altogether with modernism, or becomes something we  downplay and disguise with off-rhyme, enjambment, and other de-emphasizers.

Rhyme never really goes away, of course, and it has remained with us in popular poetry, in song, and in poetic movements that set themselves self-consciously against the dominant culture of unrhymed verse.  It has also been notably present in rap, and some poets have taken up the form of rhyme found there—a form in reminiscent of the Romantic or late Byronic model.  Here, rhyme is meant to be noticed for newness and originality, and sometimes, too, for a semantic component that goes along with the sonic one.  Rap rhyme is (as Robert Strong, who spoke at a panel just before Madrid's, says) often most intensely original and attention-grabbing at moments of extreme praise or of denunciation.  Moon/june just won't cut it in this paradigm.  And since one can bend the spoken/rapped word to fit the rhyme one can create oral rhymes where none would have been expected, as Eminem famously did when he created full sonic rhymes between "four inch" "storage" and the supposedly unrhymable "orange."

In his paper (which cites Madrid) Robert Strong describes the virtuosity of rhyme in rap battles, where rappers denounce one another with displays of originality in rhyme.  "Imagine that happening again in poetry," he says—but I don't have to, since I've seen it in the poetry of Michael Robbins.  The title poem of Robbins' book Alien vs. Predator, for example, consists of a depiction of just such a rhyme battle between the protagonists of the movies Alien and Predator, and—as in so many of Robbins' poems— deploys rhymes in the Byronic mode (the Robbins rhyme that most sticks in my head, and is perhaps destined to be his "intellectual/hen-pecked you all" is "Rorschach blots/Arnold Horshack thoughts").

After a fine analysis of Robbins' rhymes, and what they owe to those of Frederick Seidel, Madrid speculated on the future of rhyme, on whether it will take up the hyper-clever and virtuosic rhymes that he, Robbins, and some others of his generation employ, or whether this revival, too, will drown in a sea of its own cleverness.  But I'd run out of room in my notebook, so we'll have to simply wait, read, listen, and see.