Rhyme and meter force gaps in meaning so the muse can enter.
It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.
If you look at the timing of many of the Greek dramas from the theatrical point of view, it's all off, and I think the reason for that is that music played a very important part.
Poetry is the mathematics of writing and closely kin to music.
In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.
Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.
The meaning of a poem is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines.
It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed.
The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and a tradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind him too; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather narrower, rather more strictly compelling.
Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?
English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.
I'm a line-maker. I think that's what makes poets different from prose-writers. That's the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we're doing these two things at the same time.
I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.
The earliest English attempts at rhyming probably included words whose agreement is so slight that it deserves the name of mere 'assonance' rather than that of actual rhyme.
I am a poet, bard, scop, minnesinger, trobairitz who is driven by sound and the possibilities for vocal expression, the mouthing of text as well as intentionality or dance on the page.
What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?
It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.
We do inherently know that poetry is about the way we speak. It's about where we pause, where we drop our words in the middle of a sentence. It's about the rhythm and the cadence of the way we speak. It's about putting that down at the end of the day.
It normally happens that if you put two words together, or two syllables together, one of them will attract more weight, more emphasis, than the other. In other words, most so-called spondees can be read as either iambs or trochees.
The glorious Dryden, refiner and purifier of English verse, did less for rhyme than he did for metre.
