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Rhymed poetry can sound like doggerel if done poorly. Read T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ and tell me that it’s not poetry.
I had the misfortune of spending 10 years studying poetry and did my doctoral on it and I can tell you one of the few definite things I learned: nobody can truly and clearly explain the rules.
It’s easy to say iambic pentameter and go ‘da dum da dum’ etc. but that’s just the theoretical ideal. Shakespeare’s perfect for talking theory. I just Googled for a sonnet at random and took the first I saw…
Let me not to the marriage of true minds 1
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark 5
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come: 10
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved. 14
I guess that line 5 is probably pronounced ‘fixéd’ (two syllables) but how many syllables in line 6 or line 8? There are countless examples this where a line has eleven syllables (even taking into account the way we speak English now to the sixteenth century). They end with a soft feminine ending.
As for it being iambic, read the first line.
Is it natural to read is ‘let ME not TO the MARRiage OF true MINDS’? Sounds mechanical and false?
But that’s where the performance comes in and the fact that poets vary the metrics.
You’re probably read it more like: ‘let me NOT to the MARRiage of TRUE mind’ or some even some other variation. Just go listen to Richard Burton read verse. The man was a genius (especially his recordings of John Donne).
Different text books would describe that different ways. Some might say Shakespeare is inverting his iambs and others would have a totally different theory. Some of the best books on poetic theory don’t even believe in metrical feet as such and have better techniques for analysing the metrics.
All of which is my long winded way of saying that understanding techniques, forms, and theory are great. People interesting in poetry should do that and read the great poets (Shakespeare, Donne, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Eliot, bits of Pound, Wallace Stevens, Frank O'Hara...) Yet nothing – and I mean *nothing* – replaces having a good ear and knowing when something sounds right when it’s read aloud. Most bad poetry (indeed, most bad writing) simply jars the ear. Then again, and this is my personal opinion, modern poetry is currently dominated by an elite hostile to aesthetics (it’s why rhyme is mocked by some, though not me) who give it a bad reputation in the same way that too much modern art is made an easy target for mockery simply because of a few high profile conceptual artists.
Hmm. Written too much and straying off subject. Just wanted to add my thoughts…
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