Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 3. Poetic Technique
Rhyme

Imperfect Rhymes [3]

“Lure” and “more” are rhymes? It is enough to make the English prosodists of the past turn in their graves or if they are in heaven to make their imaginative hair angelic or archangelic stand up erect on their beatified heads. I am aware that modernist poets rhyme anything with everything. They would not shudder even in rhyming “hand” with “fiend” or “heat” with “bit” or “kid”,— probably they would do it with a wicked leer of triumph. But all the same crime is crime even if it becomes fashionable.

21 May 1937