Matthew Zapruder writes in the Los Angeles Times about the place of form, rhythm, and rhyme in poetry:
There is a great satisfaction in hearing rhyme, either in poetry or song, and knowing the world is at least for a moment orderable, that the seemingly disconnected elements can be convincingly fitted together. But while rhyme can be funny or witty, or a lovely, even essential consolation, it is obviously not necessary for poetry: Too many great poets have written free verse for the past 150 years for that to be the case.
In recent years, there’s been a rediscovery of formal elements in poetry. There’s even a sometimes quaint school of “new formalist” poets (and a hilariously overwrought opposition that describes their work as “dangerous nostalgia.”)
Zapruder writes that there is something deeply affecting about a sense of structure embedded in poetry (or other forms of art). The philosopher Denis Dutton goes so far as to argue there’s an evolutionary component to the human attachment to aesthetic form. For his part, Zapruder has found that formal elements in poetry can be subtle, implicit, or indirect.
…I think, secretly, that my poems actually do rhyme. It’s just that the rhyme is what I would call “conceptual,” that is, not made of sounds, but of ideas that accomplish what the sounds do in formal poetry: to connect elements that one wouldn’t have expected, and to make the reader or listener, even if just for a moment, feel the complexity and disorder of life, and at the same time what Wallace Stevens called the “obscurity of an order, a whole.”
Some interesting food for thought. Even if rhyming couplets, iambic pentameter, and classical models seem anachronistic, are other formal elements lurking unrecognized and unappreciated?
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