What is Rhythm?

Rhythm-is the variation of the duration of sounds or other events over time.

Now when you see the word "rhythm" the first thing that comes to mind is music, but you you can also use rhythm in poetry. Because poetry is just a song with out the music, and before you write the musical rhythms for the song you have to the poem.

There are two types of rhythm that are used in various types of poetry:

Traditional Rhythms

Unique Rhythms

"Traditional Rhythms are patterns that have been shared by poets over a period of centuries."(Three Genres p.59)

In the words of Mr. Bass traditional rhytms are the ones that have been used over and over again.

For example:

"Written on a page like it looks like eight one-syable words of even weight. But imagine how that sentence might sound to someone who doesn't understand English.

The stressed words have muscled out the unstressed. This is why you can study a foreign language from textbooks for years and still be baffled when you first hear it spoken. But the frustrations of a language student become an asset for the poet."(Three Genres p.59-60)

"Unique Rhythm describes rhythms that devised to meet the needs of an individual poem"(Three Genres p.70)

Most unique rhythms are expressed in free verse poems.

Free Verse-is a term describing various styles of poetry that are not written using strict meter or rhyme, but that still are recognizable as 'poetry' by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or another that readers can perceive to be part of a coherent whole.

"Phillip Hobsbaum identifies three major types of free verse:"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_verse)

1. free iambic verse which is an extension of the work of the Jacobean dramatists. Practitioners of this sort of free verse include: T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and W. H. Auden.

2. cadenced verse in the manner of Walt Whitman

3. free verse proper, where the discrepancies and variations of meter are centre stage

Britny H.