The power of rhymes

I tell you, one reason I like rhyming poetry is it forces ideas you wouldn't have otherwise.

Kurt Vonnegut, interview, Pages magazine, November/December 2006

Kurt Vonnegut

Today we think of Kurt Vonnegut as a novelist, primarily as the author of Slaughterhouse-Five. Yet he was also, at various points in his career, a journalist for both newspapers and magazines,  an advertising copywriter, an essayist and a short story writer. He was also, as suggested by the above quotation, a poet and a writing teacher.

In The World's Strongest Librarian, which I recently read, there is a wonderful seven-line poem by Vonnegut, reprinted from Cat's Cradle. And yes, it rhymes. As for being a writing coach, he was a favorite instructor at the Iowa Writers Workshop back in the Sixties, and for decades afterward many of America's best writers remember his contribution to their careers. One of his strengths was that he could teach a variety of different kinds of writing

So it may be worth listening to his advice about the value of poetry that rhymes.

Until a century ago, most poetry rhymed. Then came free verse, and rhymes began to seem dated, something serious poets avoided. Rhymes were left to songwriters, writers of light verse and children's verse, and Robert Frost.

Yes, Frost continued to believe in rhymed poems after most of his contemporaries had left them behind. Perhaps he would have agreed with Vonnegut, that rhyming poetry "forces ideas you wouldn't have otherwise."

So what did Vonnegut mean? Writers of free verse may be too willing to settle for the first line that comes to mind, or at least the first line that sounds good to them. Writing poetry becomes like writing prose. It is just the expression of an idea, albeit in more beautiful language. A necessity to rhyme, however, closes some doors while opening others. A rhyming scheme can force poets toward ideas they might otherwise have never had, perhaps more beautiful and original than they might have at first imagined.

The illustration that comes to mind is not from Frost or any other serious rhyming poet but rather Ogden Nash, the mid-20th century master of light verse. Consider these lines from a poem called "The Voice of Experience."

There is none so irate and awkward
As a husband being Chautauquard.

Nash was famous for making up clever words or clever pronunciations of existing words. Yet an invention like Chautauquard, which makes perfect sense in the context of the poem, would have been pointless in free verse. The necessity of a rhyme forced creativity and gave us awkward and Chautauquard and, later in the same poem, vestryman and pedestriman.

If rhyming forced creativity like that for Nash, imagine what it must have done for Frost or Wordsworth.