Posted by Caecus on October 29, 2000 at 01:37:13:
In Reply to: Yeah, like Tennyson and Shelley and T.S. Eliot... Damn those puerile poets! posted by The Arcane(VIP) on October 26, 2000 at 03:49:45:
> Give me a friggin' break. You're more than welcome to your opinion as to whether or not it's good poetry, but saying that it's limited because the author chose to make it rhyme is about as closed-minded as a child's definition of poetry as "rhyming words." Okay, I agree with you here. > Personally, considering the profoundly awful poetry I've encountered in my brief lifetime, about a hundred times more of it didn't rhyme than did. The former are written mostly by pretentious folk who think they're being dramatic and profound but come across as idiots instead. I disagree with you here. I've read plenty of bad poetry that did rhyme, as well as listened to it in song form (bad hip-hop rhymes). I don't think that rhyming has really a thing to do with poetry in relation to it's quality, either. As I've stated earlier, the dub poetry tradition has been going on for centuries in Africa and the Caribbean, and very little of it actually rhymes. Many modern poets choose to express their thoughts via rhymeless poems, and that doesn't make the poem any less bad - it only changes the style in which the message is expressed. On another note, you're arguing somewhat hypocritically here in your statement that the Critic is being closed-minded (as you did in the first paragraph) to your own statement in the second paragraph that rhymeless poems 'are written mostly by pretentious folk who think they're being dramatic and profound but come across as idiots instead.' Ergo, you're making the same mistake he is by sounding closed-minded yourself.