In Defense of Rhyme

by Euphrates Moss

In May of 2022 the Sydney Morning Herald published a critic’s verdict on the only songwriter ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Bob Dylan. David Free charged that it wasn’t Dylan’s music that was the problem but his lyrics: “When you read Dylan’s work instead of listening to it, you reduce an outstanding songwriter to a scribbler of hopelessly uneven doggerel.”

Free’s method is the standard method of picking a line, showing the word order has been bent out of true, and identifying the culprit. He writes, “Unfortunately he can’t say this in anything like the normal way, because he
needs to end his line with a rhyme for ‘fame’.”

He then generalizes: “Is there any linguistic barbarism Dylan won’t perpetrate to keep the rhymes
coming? Absolutely not… And Dylan is a repeat offender, forever butchering the norms of spoken English
in his desperate quest to generate rhymes… Great poets write great poems. They don’t compose two or three great lines, then spackle the gaps between them with verbal polyfilla.”

I want to begin by granting him a narrow point: Free is right about the line he chose. Dylan’s “Back to from where you came” is not English that anyone speaks or should write, and the reason it exists is that a rhyme was owed at the end of it. The sound came first and the syntax was bent to meet it. That is a real fault, and it is a fault produced by rhyming.

What I dispute here is not the fact but the inference. Free moves from a bent line to a verdict on the device, and the move is so quick it’s as if nothing had happened. But consider the argument applied to any other technique. Metaphor can be mixed, strained, and ridiculous. Nobody concludes that comparison is barbarism. Enjambment can be arbitrary. Free verse can be prose with the margin turned off. Meter adhered too strongly to can sound plodding. Assonance and consonance can be said to be like rhymes without conviction. And the rules of scansion aren’t settled science. In every other case we distinguish the botched instances from the resource. Rhyme alone is convicted on the evidence of its failures.

And it is convicted widely. This is not one critic having a bad morning with a Nobel laureate. In Rhyme’s Challenge: Hip Hop, Poetry, and Contemporary Rhyming Culture, published by Oxford University Press, David Caplan works from a consensus so settled that his book exists to argue against it. Rhyme, on this account, has gone “from a sine qua non to something to be avoided,” and its use “has been seen to lower any poetry to the level of doggerel.” Caplan puts it in his own voice elsewhere: “Rhymes abound in contemporary culture yet we devalue the technique’s significance.” And: “many literary critics view patterned rhyme as frivolous and beside the point, a distraction.” That is the charge in its general form, and it explains why Free could reach for the word doggerel and expect no argument. He was not being provocative. He was reciting. The universality of the “doggerel” accusation is so fixed it stands practically as a legitimizer of rhyme rather than the opposite.

Below the scholarship the same position circulates in a plainer idiom. A 2022 essay in Letter Review asked directly whether rhyming is now bad and answered: “Rhyming is being phased out because it is often thought of as childish and not taken seriously,” and it “more often than not has a singsong, childlike quality about it that won’t be taken as seriously as a non-rhyming poem.” Yeah, this is reason enough to throw out The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. By 2025 The Economist could run a piece on what it called the diminishing presence of rhyme in contemporary poetry and title the readers’ replies “Our readers opine on the death of rhyme.” The death is assumed, only the eulogies are in dispute.

Honesty requires me to name the most serious witness on that side. Hugh Kenner—the Canadian critic who did more than almost anyone to make modernism legible—left behind an unfinished monograph on rhyme, published in Common Knowledge the year after his death. In it he defines rhyme as “the production of like sounds according to a schedule that renders them predictable.” It is not hostile in tone, but devastating in its effect; read it again: it makes rhyme a scheduling mechanism, a way of arranging predictability. Kenner has since been read as having declared rhyme a minor genre, and it is not hard to see how the reading follows from the definition. I would do no one any favors to pretend we could reach a middle ground. His definition captures the mechanism without the work of rhyme. His definition is accurate only in the way that the definition of counterpoint as “the scheduling of two voices” would be accurate while telling you nothing about why Bach’s Goldberg Variations are worth hearing twice.

Simon Jarvis supplies the distinction the argument has been missing. Writing in Thinking Verse in 2011, he notes that the complaint that rhyme “jingles” is “perhaps the most frequent of all in eighteenth-century attacks on bad rhyme or on rhyme in general”—and he keeps those two things apart, which the modern version of the complaint does not. His standard is exacting rather than permissive: “Good rhyme has to be serious rhyme which does work; it must not be evasive; it must not jingle and tinkle.” We have been taught, he says, “to distinguish rhyme which does the imagination’s work from another kind of rhyme which offers ‘the tinkling and jingling of evasions’.” That is the distinction Free’s argument requires and does not make. He has found an evasion and reported the death of the resource.

One objection should be met here rather than deferred. If rhyme is in such ill favor, how did its most famous living practitioner receive the Nobel Prize? The answer is that the prize did not settle the question; it exposed it. Free’s own piece opens by quoting the Swedish Academy’s secretary—Dylan “can be read and should be read, and is a great poet in the English tradition”—for the sole purpose of contradicting it: “Dylan should be read? Oh no, he shouldn’t.” Elsewhere the complaint was put in the form of a principle, that “songwriting and poetry are entirely different arts, though they share passing similarities—meter, rhythm, rhyme, and the like.” The one occasion on which the literary establishment honored a rhymer produced a revolt within that establishment, and the specific ground of the revolt was that rhyming is not poetry. An honor that provokes that response is evidence of the prejudice, not its refutation.

So the question I want to take up is not whether rhyme can be done badly. It can, Free has shown it, and I have conceded it. The question is what good rhyme does that its absence cannot—and here Jarvis puts the claim in five words: “The rhymes both sound and think.”

What the Rhyme Is Doing While It Sounds

The charge against rhyme is that it is decoration: pleasant, optional, and purchased at the cost of sense. Well I would say sense on the dollar at that! All seriousness aside, the answer is that rhyme is a semantic instrument before it is an ornamental one. It asserts a relation between two words, and the assertion is made by the ear before the mind has a chance to object. That is not a weakness in the technique. It is the whole of its power. Given these persuasive properties, this fact elevates rhyme to not just the level of art but the level of philosophy. I’m not going to say a lot of philosophers used rhyme but I could see it being used in philosophy more often than it was. I thus throw my hat in the ring for rhyming in philosophy.

W.K. Wimsatt, following Jarvis, gives the mechanism precisely. Part of what makes Pope a master of rhyme, Wimsatt argues, is “the relationship between the logical and the alogical in his rhyming.” Pope varies the part of speech across the rhyme, “so that instead of nouns continually rhyming with nouns, verbs with verbs, and so on, rhyme-partnerships are more often exogamous: nouns with verbs.” And then the payoff: “when rhyme-partners present not only a semantic distinction but also a syntactical contrast, the wedding of the logical with the alogical takes place across a more marked disjunction, and is therefore more satisfying.” That word wedding is exact. Rhyme marries two words that have no business being married, and the reader assents to the match on the authority of sound alone. Look at what Pope does with it in The Rape of the Lock:

Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes Tea.

The entire satire of the couplet is in the rhyme. “Obey” and “Tea” are not related; the poem relates them, and in relating them it puts the governance of three kingdoms and the taking of a hot drink on the same shelf, at the same level of consequence, with the same faint click of closure. No paraphrase gets that. You can state the proposition—that Queen Anne’s court treats statecraft and refreshment as interchangeable diversions—and you will have said the content and lost the argument, because the argument was the equivalence, and the equivalence was performed by the rhyme. Two lines earlier Pope has “foredoom” find “home,” dooming foreign tyrants and domestic nymphs in a single breath by the same means. The rhyme is not carrying the joke. The rhyme is the joke, and it is also the political judgment.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

This is the most famous couplet in the English language for me. The General Prologue of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is a masterclass in storytelling, setting up rules, and proper exposition. It’s just a shame Chaucer likely didn’t live long enough to follow them.

As noted, Free asks whether the language has been bent to serve the sound. In Pope it clearly has: the inversion “counsel take” is there because “take” cannot end the line and “Tea” must. By Free’s standard this is a barbarism, a great poet spackling with polyfilla. By any standard anyone has ever actually applied to Pope, it is one of the most famous couplets in English. The criterion does not survive its own application. Free then adds insult to injury by describing a miserable Dylan concert he went to. The person up on stage was described as being so bad Free suspected him of not being Bob Dylan at all. He even tried to leave but the crowd had formed an impenetrable mass of overratedness around him. To that complaint, maybe we can all agree Dylan was at his best when he first went electric.

Rhyme as a Way of Thinking

The deeper claim I want to put weight on is that rhyme is not merely capable of carrying thought but is also a means of producing it. Jarvis asks directly whether there can be “a musical or a prosodic thinking, a thinking which is not simply a little picture of” thought—”a kind of thinking in tunes.” His answer, and mine, is yes, and the consequence is stated in a sentence that ought to be quoted more often than it is: “Rhyme which merely served already existing needs and thoughts, without generating new ones, would not really be perfectly emancipated, but perfectly dead.” This inverts the usual complaint. The objection says rhyme constrains what the poet meant to say. Jarvis says that rhyme which only transmits what the poet already meant is the dead kind. The living kind interferes. It proposes matches the poet had not considered and, occasionally, the poem takes on—not because the poet ran out of options, but because the rhyme was right about something the poet had not yet worked out.

I say take that risk and write poetry outside of your comfort zone. It might change you. Every poet who has written in rhyme knows the experience and most are too embarrassed to describe it, because it sounds like an abdication of control. It is not. It is the same submission a composer makes to a key signature, or a draughtsman to perspective: a constraint accepted because it sees further than unaided intention does. Jarvis’s word for what a great rhymer accumulates is a “rhyme-thesaurus, a repertoire of effects which are simultaneously and indissociably ideal, conceptual, semantic, syntactic, phonological, phonetic, material, contingent, stuff.” His summary: “Rhyme sounds on all these instruments at once.” A technique that operates on eight registers simultaneously is not merely ornamental. Nothing else in the language does that.

Consider what happens at the close of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” Frost has committed to an ABAAB stanza, which means his last stanza owes two rhymes to “sigh”:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,

The scheme requires that “sigh” be answered twice, and what answers it is I, and then by. The poem’s whole famous irony, that the speaker is rehearsing a story he does not quite believe, and that the sigh is coming, is carried by the fact that the pronoun falls into the sound of the sigh and cannot get out of it. The dash after “I” is the poem catching itself. A free-verse version of these lines can report the irony. It cannot make the reader’s ear enact it, because there is nothing for “I” to fall into. Kind of like how we can’t seem to fall out of pronouns today but that’s a different story.

Where Rhyme Actually Went

There is one more thing to say, and it is the part of the argument most likely to irritate readers who agree with everything above. The consensus holds that rhyme declined. What actually happened is that rhyme changed address.

Caplan’s book is built on the observation that rhyme is “ubiquitous in contemporary culture, despite the scholarly consensus that it is nearly dead.” Its most demanding contemporary practice is in hip hop, and Caplan’s argument about it is not a concession to fashion but a technical claim: “hip hop, with its polysyllabic forced rhymes, is not weakening rhyme but redefining it.” Where a critic sees incompetence, he sees the opposite: “Changing a word’s pronunciation to fit a rhyme is a sign of mastery of the language, rather than technical incompetence.” Rapper Eminem once corrected himself from “tweece” to “twice” and then brushed it off saying, “Whatever, I hate these things.” That being in his famed song “Kill You”—perhaps his greatest or second greatest set of bars to date.

Bob Dylan’s fault with “back from whence you came” is that he commits the fault of bending the line to fit the rhyme while feigning innocence. A rapper can stretch a vowel across a bar to land a four-syllable rhyme and do the opposite, displaying the stretch, making the strain audible, and asking to be judged on it. Pope’s inversion is of that second kind. So is Byron’s. The fault is more with feigning innocence than with the bending itself. Caplan’s further observation is the one I find most damaging to the consensus. Doggerel, he notes, “abounds in hip hop” and is “an extremely minor form in contemporary poetry”—and it serves hip hop well precisely because “prosodic satire and parody rely on an established sense of metrical and rhyming decorum, which the contemporary print-based poetry notably lacks.” Follow that. To violate a norm expressively, you need the norm. A poetry that has abandoned rhyme has not freed itself from rhyme’s constraints; it has forfeited a whole register of effect, because it no longer has anything to strain against. The prosodic resources of parody, of mock-heroic, of bathos, of the deliberately terrible rhyme that indicts its speaker—all of them require a decorum to offend. Free verse did not liberate the poet from those effects, it only disarmed them.

What Choosing Rhyme Now Means

Jarvis makes one further remark, almost in passing, and it names the real situation of anyone writing in rhyme today: “Whoever selects rhyme as a practicing poet today will find that, first of all, he will be understood to have performed a socially symbolic act.” This is true and it is worth resenting. A poet who uses rhyme in 2026 is read as having made a statement—about tradition, about difficulty, about the audience he wants—before a single line of his has been read as a line. The technique arrives pre-interpreted. That is the cost of the consensus this essay has been documenting, and it falls on the work, not on the argument.

But the situation cuts the other way too. When a device becomes a choice rather than a default, using it well becomes legible as achievement in a way it could not be in 1712, when everyone rhymed and rhyming proved nothing. The eighteenth century could take Pope’s couplet for granted. We cannot, which means we are in a better position than Pope’s first readers to see what it is doing. That’s no small thing to celebrate but let’s not justify trashing a major poetic device just to get that kind of sight.

So I will end where the objection began, and grant Free the last of his ground. Rhyme is not necessary. A poem can do without it, and thousands of good ones have. The claim of this essay is narrower and, I think, harder to dislodge: that rhyme is a means of thinking which has no substitute, that the effects it produces cannot be got any other way, and that a literature which has decided in advance that the device is childish has not outgrown a limitation. It has mislaid an instrument, and then explained the loss as progress. What other tools will we lose as time passes, I wonder.

The rhymes both sound and think. It is the thinking that we have stopped listening for. And with that we have truly gone the way of the Philistines.

Sources

David Free, “Bob Dylan, a great poet? A great delusion more like it,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 2, 2022 —
David Caplan, Rhyme’s Challenge: Hip Hop, Poetry, and Contemporary Rhyming Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014). Reviewed by Sidney Kochman, May 2, 2014
Caplan’s chapter “Reduced to Rhyme: Contemporary Doggerel”
“Is Rhyming In Poetry Now Bad?”, Letter Review, August 2, 2022
“Our readers opine on the death of rhyme,” The Economist, June 10, 2025,
letters responding to “Feeling Averse,” May 31, 2025
Hugh Kenner, “Rhyme: An Unfinished Monograph,” Common Knowledge 10:3 (2004),
377–425. The definition at p. 394 is quoted in Jacket2
The “minor genre” characterization is D.G. Myers’s
Simon Jarvis, “Why rhyme pleases,” Thinking Verse I (2011), 17–43
Jarvis’s discussion of Wimsatt on Pope’s rhyme is in the same essay.
“Bob Dylan is a legend, but he doesn’t deserve his Nobel Prize,” VICE
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, Canto III
Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”