But the distaste for rhyme goes back further than that. Early modernist poets like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein reacted strongly against Victorian and Edwardian verse, where rhyme was often predictable and ornamental, and they argued that it encouraged poets to choose words for sound rather than for accuracy or emotional truth. Free verse came to stand for honesty, immediacy, and a closer fit between thought and language

Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"

Recently, a friend of mine wrote that he had planted a “copper beach” tree at his farm in the Huon Valley. Although a scholar and polymath, who may well have been deceived by the autocorrect function, he seemed to me to be deserving of a minor rebuke

Evening light will bring the water;
Day long sun will burst the bud,
Clemency the General’s daughter,
Will return upon the flood

By the last stanza, however, the language has drawn closer to its object, as the same headlong rhythm draws ancient and modern into a poetic continuum.