Why I Do Not Employ Rhyme

A FEW WORDS ABOUT FORM

by Brett Rutherford
From Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural Poems, Sixth edition 2019.

Early Gothic or supernatural poems were imitative of ballads, and employed rhyme, and ballad measures, most typically six or eight syllable lines. Rhyme was assumed to be the norm for this kind of writing. The German ghost ballads, and earlier English and Scottish ballads that inspired them, set the mold for the Gothic poem.

As a poet of the 20th and 21st centuries, and having learned the art in San Francisco and New York in the twilight of the Beat era, I completely break with fixed rhyme and fixed meters. In the poetry circles in which I worked and began my serious writing and publishing, such poems were objects of scorn. The occasional accidental rhyme was a delight, a final couplet was an accepted nod to Shakespeare, and a sonnet was respected, provided its rhymes were executed with great subtlety.

While I have studied the supernatural poem in English from its sources through the early 1900s, in my annotated editions of M.G. Lewis’s Tales of Wonder and my own succeeding volumes, Tales of Terror, and acknowledged those fine works in their contexts, I continue to be convinced that fixed meter and rhyme in English are anathema. Even when I adapt a rhyming poem from Russian or German or French, I do not employ rhyme in my own English version. 


Do not mistake what I do for “free verse.” Inspired by Shakespeare, Poe, Shelley, Whitman, and Jeffers in poetry, by Bradbury in prose, and by Romantic art and music, I seek to use every device in the poet’s arsenal even while avoiding the dreaded rhyme. My works range from short-line improvisations to longer works in blank verse or extensions thereof. Not every line is “poetic,” and indeed, in some poems, there is a prosaic “warming up,” like the recitative before an opera aria, before the rhapsodic passages take flight. The narrative poem is a more relaxed medium than the short lyric. 

Many poems have leaped to the page, all but fully-formed. These days I awaken from a vivid dream and go straight to pen and paper, sometimes writing completely-formed stanzas (this is not a boast but a description of the process). 

Readers will recognize my debts to my masters, and of these resemblances I am proud. I continue to experiment with longer lines that have a more “operatic” breath, and almost all my poems are intended to be read aloud. The quest, even amid terror, is for language to offer the sense of sudden inspiration, and to deliver the sublime.