Poetry Doesn’t Have to Rhyme
Rhyme is a tool, not a defining characteristic.
If you were to ask an ordinary person in the Western world — that is, somebody who’s not an English major or specifically versed in poetry — what the defining characteristics of a poem are, you might get some criteria like:
- Poems are written in lines and stanzas instead of sentences and paragraphs.
- Poems use more figurative language and rhetorical devices.
- Poems rhyme.
That third one, especially, seems to be a kind of sticking point. Poems rhyme. More specifically, poetry is the only kind of writing that is allowed to rhyme. You don’t see a lot of it in prose — whether it’s creative work, like a novel, or stolid and academic, like a research paper.
Actually, though now that I think about it, I would really love to read an Organic Chemistry thesis written in rhyming couplets. There’s something quite poetic about all of those damn hexagons.
(I understand literally nothing about Organic Chemistry, except that it’s all Carbon and painfully complicated names. If you changed just one thing in this…
