Should all poems rhyme?

In this world there is nothing that is perfect, so perfect rhyme i'll leave that up to you. I've been a rhymer for more years than i care to remember, decades!! all i'm going to say on the subject is this, don't try too hard don't try to make every line rhyme Don't force it.

I just completed a rhyme and meter class with Allpoetry.com (it was free). I failed the first assignment because my rhymes were not perfect. The teacher told me to go to www.rhymezone.com to complete the assignment. I got mad and I wrote something dumb like "The cat sat on a mat and ate a wicked hat". At first, I wanted to quit the course because I loathed the idea of looking for perfectly rhyming words on a website. The teacher reminded me that the assignment was merely an exercise to help students to appreciate the discipline of writing perfect rhymes. She challenged me to stay in the course so that I would have a better understanding of the foundations of poetry.

It turned out to be an awesome class and I am now taking part two.

I am a rhymer and have been since the 1960/70s, i'm not saying poetry must or must not rhyme. I just love the constraints that rhyme puts on your vocabulary, people who write free verse have the whole dictionary of words to choose from not so the rhymer. The rhymer has to tell his/her story with a limited amount of words. Another thing to bare in mind is do you want people to remember what you wrote two/twenty years time? if so try rhyme it is much easier to remember. I can remember the first poem i ever wrote and most of all of them since. Some free verse writers i know couldn't tell you what they wrote a year ago without looking it up, This is just my opinion and i have been around a long time.

When I started, I did rhyme.

And rhyme is one of my most use tools in poetry.

However, not every poem needs to rhyme.

All comes down to poem being spoken and written.

If poem rhymes, great.

If not, flow.

Poetry is art. Art is expression. Poetry doesn't have to be in rhyme, just felt by the heart 💖

I believed for a long time that poetry should rhyme because that is the first type of poetry you are introduced to as a child. I adore rhyming, it is one of my most used tools as a poet. But I also love to write free verse with no rhyme at all.

I think it's less about rules and more about what comes naturally to you 😊

Not really. I think it all depend what the poem is trying to tell.

I'm a traditionalist in my writing... at least I'm becoming more and more traditionalist in style and taste. I did first start out writing spontaneous prose thanks to my love for Kerouac.

I do always love a rhyme scheme in the poems that I read, however never if that means that as Rachel said, they are obvious rhymes. I was curious because I know there are some poets out there who are total advocates of rhymes, and would say that if a poem doesn't rhyme, it is not a poem.

So I'm so curious as to what the general consensus is, and what other poets may say to people who would dismiss any work if it didn't rhyme.

No poems don´t need to rhyme. Feel what you feel and write what you feel. A poems ability to catch is not so much as what it says or in what form it is written. It is what it makes you feel that determines if you love it or not.

No. I have a great appreciation for rhyming poetry, but free verse is what I typically read.

rhyme and form are tools just like metaphor, alteration, and repetition. To say a poem isn’t really a poem if it doesn’t rhyme is just a kind of gatekeeping. All forms have their merits and their places.

Rhyme and constraints are actually a great starting point for those who want to write Free Verse. It's said that "you will not understand freedom if you don't understand constraints". I spent 10 years in rhyme by choice, as I wanted to learn how of the craft worked: how sound worked, how flow worked, how I could mold structure in the boundaries of structure. So by the time I was ready to make a foray into Free Verse, it was easy to slip into a mindset of pure flow. People treat rhyme as obsolete and a dead language, but it's an advantage. Not everyone can ride a two-wheel bike on the first try. For those wanting to write Free Verse, think of Rhyme as training wheels. But a motto I have to share with poets of all styles and forms is "Don't think; feel"– the poem knows what I wants, let the poem do the talking.

I agree. My first poem did rhyme but I didn’t enjoy writing it as much as I could. So now I mostly write in free verse and if something rhymes it rhymes. 😄

I have to echo what Lunabear said. I think the first poems we're introduced to have rhymes typically following an ABAB pattern. However, as I've got older, I'm of the opinion that poetry can take any form it needs to. I never use rhyme (intentionally, anyway) because it kind of stresses me out finding a line that includes a hat just so it can rhyme with cat.

More than that (an unintentional third rhyme appears), I sometimes find that as a reader, I'm so focused on following the rhyme that I don't appreciate the true content of the poem. Also, I'm a great believer that rhymes have to be...interesting. That's the only word I can think of. As in: cat/hat is a very obvious rhyme. Rhyme works best when it's interesting or unexpected.

This is all my own personal opinion, obviously 😀

For the longest time, I did. I think that's because rhyming was the first type of poetry I was introduced to, and that was my end all, be all. If a person believes their poems would benefit better from rhymes, then yes. For me personally, however, not every poem HAS to rhyme. There's so great fun in free flow.