The History of Rhyme and Its Crisis in Contemporary Poetry

Abstract

This article treats the development of rhyme from its origins in medieval Latin “rhythmic” prose to various forms in European languages. Just like meter at the level of verse rhythm, rhyme exhausted its artistic possibilities in the second half of the nineteenth century, yielding its place to free verse. The author examines various reasons for the rhyme crisis in the contemporary poetry of some languages: the small number of pure rhymes in English, the danger of rhythmic monotony due to the oxytonic nature of French, which resulted in a complicated set of versification rules, the long and rich history of rhymed Italian poetry that ended with clichés, and so on. The fact that rhyme can still be fruitfully used in contemporary Slovenian poetry shows that – despite the existence of thousand-year-old documents written in Slovenian – it is a relatively young poetic language. That is also why contemporary Slovenian translators of classic poetry mostly still use rhymes that have disappeared from the repertory of procedures used by translators in many other languages. – This paper views rhyme not only as an acoustic device, but also as a rhythmic and semantic procedure that helps maintain the “memory of the language”: repeating rhythmic and sound patterns (including alliteration and assonance in addition to rhyme) and their echoes establish a time-memory vertical that surpasses the linear flow of words into silence and oblivion. Whenever we hear the same rhythmic pattern or rhyme, the words that have already sunk into the past are brought back to the present.