Cheap End Rhyme

The vast majority of people think I hate rhyme, and that’s simply not true. What bothers me is meaningless rhyme that intrudes, insisting that rhyme is more important than meaning. I disagree and firmly believe that meaning is the most important thing in any written work. I have strong opinions about author notes that explain a work. I was taught that if the work needs explaining, the work has failed on the most fundamental level of criticism, which is formalism: does the work hold; is it unified? Can you remove anything from it without changing the meaning? If so, the work has failed.

What is cheap end rhyme? It’s laziness, or it’s an assertion that rhyme is the singular element of poetry, emphasizing things that don’t bear emphasizing or utilizing linguistics that clash with the idea (really? sacrificing meaning, literally killing it, for sound? What kind of animals do this?). It’s often compounded with either forced metre that brings a sing song quality, again, at the cost of meaning or inconsistent metre that trips the reader’s tongue with phonetic hurdles the author demands, once again, for the sake of a sound resonating either nothing or the opposite of what the language insists.

I also call this intrusive rhyme, although intrusive rhyme isn’t limited to end sounds, but I don’t think it conveys how offensive it is to call these atrocities against poetry “poems.” If you have a great message but don’t have great language that resonates the meaning of the message through rhythm and sound, put it in prose and post it in writers (no minimum word count) or critique (no minimum word count) instead of muddying your message for end rhyme.

If words rhyme, they should resonate something important to the work, not the author. Rhyming for the sake of rhyming, frankly, is obnoxious and an assault on poetry itself. If you’re going to use rhyme, you have to earn it. “Why does this word need to resonate through repeated sound?” is a question that should always be asked about end rhyme words. Both words need to be important to the idea and meaning intended by the work, and the sounds the words make should resonate meaning.

But what about what the poet wants? Frankly, if I’m being asked to look at the poet and what the poet wants instead of the work itself, I’m offended. I’m not a strict formalist in that I also embrace New Critical Theory, Structuralism, Post Structuralism, and the other gatekeeping schools of thought that focus on the work itself. For me, if a work can’t pass through these gates intact, it isn’t worth my time, especially if it’s just a bunch of miserable feelings rhyming miserably, signifying nothing, resonating nothing. It’s an insult to poetry itself to call these assaults on language “poems.” Before I’ll evaluate the merits of a piece of writing as poetry, I need textual proof that it is indeed a poem, not just some thoughts or feelings forced into cheap end rhyme.