Free The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

make something clear. You may think we're in a new age, a modern or postmodern age, and yes, in a certain way we are. But as far as rhyme and anti-rhyme go, this is the third time around, or maybe the fourth. Thomas Campion, in 1602 or so, came out with an attack on the uncouthness of rhyme, which was very strange for him to do because he was one of the great lute-song writers of the day. He'd published two, maybe three books of airs. But no, suddenly rhyme and the normal meters were no good. They were vulgar, he said, they were unclassical, they forced a poet to go in directions he shouldn't go.
    Everyone at court was buzzing about this strange tract of Campion's. And when Samuel Daniel read it it was as if his whole world was under siege, and he was deeply distressed. He said he felt that he must either "stand out to defend, or else be forced to forsake myself, and give over all." So he stood out to defend. Now remember this is more than four hundred years ago. All those years ago Samuel Daniel, writing in English, in words that you can easily read now--although some of them are spelled differently, and the sentences flow on in a way that our sentences don't--but Daniel says that for a poet who knows what he's up to, rhyme is no impediment. In fact, it helps him soar higher, he says. It "carries him, not out of his course, but as it were beyond his power to a farre happier flight." That's what rhyme does, if you're properly fitted for it.
    Samuel Daniel was a court poet. He published a book of poems with a lovely, modest title. I think it's my favorite title of a book of poetry ever. The title is Certaine Small Poems Lately Printed. He was a man of some humility and grace. And he won his duel with Campion. Campion changed his mind and went back to rhyming. His neoclassical hexameters were pretty in a way, but people wanted to hear him sing.
    And that's the single point I want to make today. People have been struggling over this idea that rhyme is artificial and unnatural for hundreds and hundreds of years. And meanwhile poem after poem gets written that people really want to listen to. And a lot of these poems rhyme. Imagine what would have happened if Campion had succeeded in his effort to fuss and scold rhyme out of existence and banish it from English poetry. Four hundred years of pretend Greek and Latin meters is what we would have had, instead of Marvell, and Dryden, and Cole Porter, and Christina Rossetti, and Gilbert and Sullivan, and Rogers and Hart, and Wendy Cope, and Auden, and John Lennon, and John Hiatt, and Irving Berlin, and Dr. Seuss, and Shel Silverstein, and Charles Causley, and Keats, and Paul Simon, and et cetera, and so on. Whole floors of libraries could be filled with the poems that we would not have had. Marilyn Monroe wouldn't have been able to sing
I've locked my heart
I'll keep my feelings there
I've stocked my heart
With icy frigid air
    And think of it: you can put on the coolest, most spaced-out house trance music today--and it rhymes. "Got nervous when you looked my way, / But you knew all the words to say." That's a couplet from a trance tune by a group called iiO, in a remix by Armin Van Buuren, and nobody thinks tiptoe through the tulips when they're dancing to this, they just think, Yeah, the words work, they fit, they have that forward push of power. And they have that push because they rhyme. So it just continues. And nobody really stops to examine the need, the powerful endlessness and hunger of the need. Why? Why do we need things to rhyme so much?
    W HY DO I, who can't make a couplet worth a roasted peanut these days, want poetry to do what I can't make it do? Mary Oliver is my favorite poet at the moment, and she almost never rhymes. W. S. Merwin's The Vixen is one of my favorite books of poems, and it doesn't rhyme. Not only does The Vixen not rhyme, not only does it not scan, it doesn't even capitalize or punctuate. And it's good. But I want these books to be in the minority.