Meter and Rhyme—Defended? And, On Interpretation.

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Art by Elliot Skow

“How Shall the Poem be Written?” asked the poet J. V. Cunningham, and he answered “In metrical language.” Some motives for favoring free verse, he argued, no longer exist:

why have generations of poets set out to destroy the iambic pentameter and its predecessor, the iambic octosyllable? Partly because it was the fashion, but also because traditional meter carried with it the rhetoric, subjects, attitudes, and values the revolution was directed against, the linguistic and social notions of correctness. But that rhetoric, those subjects, and those values have been lost.

Other motives are based on mistakes. Metrical verse is alleged to be artificial, and “to exclude the natural rhythms of real speech”:

It is said again and again, as if it were true, that people do not talk in iambic pentameters. But they do; not always, but enough. Some months ago I sat in the sun and wrote down these lines at random. They are segments of real speech:

I’ll have the special and a glass of milk.
The order will be ready when you come.
We ought to be in Cleveland in an hour.
I haven’t anything to say to you.
Goddamn it, what in the hell is going on?
I’ll think it over and I’ll let you know.
Oh, go to hell! Who do you think you are?
She does her exercises every day.
How often shall I see you in a lifetime?

But perhaps more often people talk in the octosyllabic line, in iambic tetrameters:

I love her and I always will.
Young poets are a dime a dozen.
I’ll be there anytime you say. 
He doesn’t love me anymore.
Darling, I’d rather not tonight.

It seems a truism that a poem’s rhymes can help make it great. But the great John Milton disagreed, and disparaged rhyme as a crutch and a cover: