Rhythm and Meter

From Modern American Poetry, Copyright © 2002 by The Great Books Foundation

Part of what makes poetry different from other kinds of writing is its compact and vivid means of expression. In fact, in ancient times, poetry served as a way to put important information into a form of language that people could easily memorize, because written language did not yet exist. Lines that rhyme or that have a definite sequence of sound and stress are easier to remember than lines without these patterns. Two of the most obvious formal qualities of poetry are therefore rhyme and meter, or the pattern of accents in a poem.

Consider these famous opening lines from Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”: “Whose woods these are I think I know. / His house is in the village, though.” The rhyme is obvious and the meter compelling. By the time you’ve said “His house is in the village,” you feel the poem demanding one more word, of exactly one syllable and rhyming with “know.” Critics of this poem find its forceful rhythm—they might call it a singsong rhythm—too strong, but a great deal of poetry throughout history has had this kind of compelling formal structure because that’s what makes poems easy to remember. Before the development of written language, people “published” family histories, stories of battles and wars, and even things like classic recipes by putting them into poems that were, like Robert Frost’s poem, hard to forget.

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