Why Don’t Modern Poems Rhyme, Etc.

Frequently asked questions about the business of verse.

1. Sometimes I see a poem in Slate or another magazine, and it doesn’t do a thing for me. Half of the time I can’t figure out what it means—what is that all about?

Generalizing won’t do. We’d have to discuss a particular poem. At times prominent magazines publish things that aren’t very good.



The gentle reader loves the gentle Muse.
That little dares, and little means;
Who humbly sips her learning from Reviews,
Or flutters in the Magazines.

2. Isn’t so-called “free verse” just prose chopped into lines?



William Carlos Williams, “Fine Work With Pitch and Copper

Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man

3. How come modern poets don’t write in rhyme?


Thom Gunn, “Still Life

Thom Gunn, “The Reassurance

4. How come real poetry—in our great-grandparents’ time or, anyway, some other long-ago time—was easy to understand and great?

Do you mean like this?


Emily Dickinson, “I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl”

I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—
Life’s little duties do—precisely—
As the very least
Were infinite—to me—I put new Blossoms in the Glass—
And throw the old—away—
I push a petal from my Gown
That anchored there—I weigh
The time-twill be till six o’clock
I have so much to do—
And yet—Existence—some way back—
Stopped—struck—my ticking—through—
We cannot put Ourself away
As a completed Man
Or Woman—When the Errand’s done
We came to Flesh—upon—
There may be—Miles on Miles of Nought—
Of Action—sicker far—
To simulate—is stinging work—
To cover what we are
From Science—and from Surgery—
Too Telescopic Eyes
To beat on us unshaded—
For their—sake—not for Ours—
’Twould start them—
We—could tremble—
But since we got a Bomb—
And held it in our Bosom—
Nay—Hold it—it is calm—
Therefore—we do life’s labor—
Though life’s Reward—be done—
With scrupulous exactness—
To hold our Senses—on—


Or do you mean like this?

Edgar Guest, “Home”

Afore ye really ‘preciate the things ye lef’ behind,
Until somehow yer soul is sort o’ wrapped round everything. Home ain’t a place that gold can buy or get up in a minute;
And gradjerly as time goes on, ye find ye wouldn’t part
With anything they ever used—they’ve grown into yer heart:
Ye hoard; an’ if ye could ye’d keep the thumb-marks on the door. Ye’ve got t’ weep t’ make it home, ye’ve got t’ sit an’ sigh
An’ tuggin’ at ye always are the pleasant memories
o’ her that was an’ is no more—ye can’t escape from these. Ye’ve got t’ sing an’ dance fer years, ye’ve got t’ romp an’ play,
Even the roses ‘round the porch must blossom year by year


5. Who is Edgar Guest?

The most popular poet in American history. Sold a million copies when a million was a million; wrote a syndicated poem-a-day column; had his own radio show and even, for a while, his own TV show in the early days of that medium. Here’s a poem by a poet more or less his contemporary, less popular than Guest was though more read today:

Marianne Moore, “Silence”

My father used to say,
“Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow’s grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat—
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth—
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.”
Inns are not residences.


6. How come American poets don’t write about politics or current events?

Read the following:

Allen Ginsberg, “America

Robert Lowell, “Waking Early Sunday Morning

Muriel Rukeyser, “Mearl Blankenship

7. But what about living American poets—how come they don’t write about politics or current events?


C.K. Williams, “Fear”

1. At almost the very moment an exterminator’s panel truck,
the blowup of a cockroach airbrushed on its side,
pulls up at a house across from our neighborhood park,
a battalion of transient grackles invades the picnic ground,and the odd thought comes to me how much in their rich sheen,
mightn’t those subversive voices beneath us sound like that?Roaches, though … Last year, our apartment house was overrun,
insecticides didn’t work, there’d be roaches on our toothbrushes 
……and combs.
The widower downstairs—this is awful—who’d gone through
and the camps and was close to dying now and would sometimes
……faint,was found one morning lying wedged between his toilet and a wall,
naked, barely breathing, the entire surface of his skin alive
with the insolent, impervious brutes, who were no longer daunted
by the light, or us—the Samaritan neighbor had to scrape them off.2.Vermin, poison, atrocious death: what different resonance they have
Every other week brings new warnings, new false alarms;
it’s hard to know how much to be afraid, or even how.
The second world war was barely over, in annihilated cities
children just my age still foraged for scraps of bread,and we were being taught that our war would be nuclear,
that if we weren’t incinerated, the flesh would rot from our bones.
By the time Kennedy and Khrushchev faced off over Cuba,
rockets primed and aimed, we were sick with it, insane.And now these bewildering times, when those whose interest is
to consternate us hardly bother to conceal their purposes.
but is no one blameless, are we all to be combatants, prey?3.We have offended very grievously, and been most tyrannous,
wrote Coleridge, invasion imminent from radical France;
the wretched plead against us
… then, Father and God,
spare us
, he begged, as I suppose one day I will as well.I still want to believe we’ll cure the human heart, heal it
of its anxieties, and the mistrust and barbarousness they spawn,
but hasn’t that metaphorical heart been slashed, dissected,
cauterized and slashed again, and has the carnage relented, ever?Night nearly, the exterminator’s gone, the park deserted,
the swings and slides my grandsons play on forsaken.
more politics of terror; war, threats of war, war without end.A half-chorus of grackles still ransacks the trash;
in their intricate iridescence they seem eerily otherworldly,


Frank Bidart, “To the Republic

Ann Winters, “The Displaced of Capital

8. Aren’t a lot of contemporary song lyrics the real poetry of our time?


Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Or this:

Jack Gilbert, “Measuring the Tyger

Or this:

Yusuf Komunyakaa, “Facing It

Or this:

Louise Bogan, “Several Voices Out of a Cloud
