Rhyme in Contemporary Poetic Discourse: Communicative-Pragmatic Characteristics

The article is dedicated to exploring the role of rhyme in the English poetic discourse of the XXI century. Rhyme, being the central element of most poetic genres, has unique pragmatic effect both when it is present (in classical verse) and absent (in verse libre). The role of rhyme ranges from ensuring memorization to broader communicative and cognitive influences, as justified by the studies reviewed in the article. The aim of the article is to contrast practices of using and omitting rhyme in contemporary English poetry and to reveal the pragmatic potential of rhyme. For this purpose, works of contemporary poets are scrutinized via methods of comparison and contrast, pragmatic analysis and stylistic analysis. Our findings show that rhyme, whenever present, serves not only for text memorization or embellishment, but also has deeper relations with the core of the poem. In case of verse libre or blank verse, the absence of rhyme (especially when paired with the graphic element of ignoring capital letters) turns a poem into a dynamic work, an unfinished process. An increasing tendency of ignoring rhyme in contemporary English poetry might be linked to the graphic character of poetry itself. Whenever rhyme is absent, there is an “extra” element which fills its place, and usually those elements are either graphical additions or peculiarities of punctuation. The scientific novelty of the article lies in revealing the pragmatic role of rhyme and justifying that this role is fulfilled even when rhyme is absent. The theoretical and practical significance of the article lies in exploring the role of rhyme considering pragmatics, stylistics, and cognitive poetics.