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From: wcs@ho95b.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.poems
Subject: Milton on Rhyme
Message-ID: <534@houxf.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 5-Dec-83 12:31:13 EST
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Posted: Mon Dec  5 12:31:13 1983
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<-- a line for the inscrutable white-space munger

Glenn Reid writes:
	"... I then looked in books by Blake, Shelley, Poe, and
	others, and I couldn't find a single poem that *didn't*
	rhyme.  And, to tell you the truth, I think most people
	would agree with me that Blake's poems are better than thw
	stuff I was reading as "new" poetry. [...] I guess I'm just
	a "classicist" in that I like a little meter with my rhyme..."

Probably the most significant "classicist" in English poetry was
John Milton.  His preface to "Paradise Lost" contains some classic
flames against "Rime".  (I've never had the time to get more than halfway
through "Paradise Lost", which, although powerful and well-written,
is *awfully* slow going.)  (He may roll over in his grave hearing
his preface referred to as a "flame", but it rather is.)
Anyway, here it is, complete with original spelling and capitalization:

			Paradise Lost
		    A poem in Twelve Books

			The Verse

       "The measure is English Heroic Verse, without Rime, as that
	of Homer in Greek. and of Virgil in Latin; Rime being no
	necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem od good Verse, in
	longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous
	Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter; grac't
	indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried
	away by Custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance,
	and constraint, to express many things otherwise, and for
	the most part worse than  they would have exprest them.
	Not without cause, therefore, some both Italian and Spanish
	Poets of prime note, have rejected Rime both in longer and
	shorter Works, as have also, long since our best English
	Tragedies, as a thing of it self, to all judicious ears,
	triveal and of no musical delight; which consists only in
	apt Numbers, fit quantity of Syllables, and the sense
	variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the
	jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoyded by the
	learned Ancients both in Poetry and all good Oratory.  This
	neglect then of Rime so little is to be taken for a defect,
	though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar Readers, that it is
	rather to be esteem'd an example set, the first in English,
	of ancient liberty recover'd to Heroic Poem from the
	troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing."

I generally find rhyme a bit tedious, especially rhymed couplets.  (I
will refrain from further flaming about meterless rhyme as poetry.)
On the other hand, I do enjoy some of the generally meterless modern
stuff; there's a lot of good imagery that works best as poetry, but
would be hampered by either rhyme or meter.

			Bill