In his Observations on the Art of English Poesie (1602), Thomas Campion makes one of the rare attacks on rhyme in the history of English poetics. Referring to the widespread use of rhyme in his day, Campion observes that ‘things naturally imperfect can not be perfected by use’ and concludes ‘that ill uses are to be abolisht’. Rhyme, for Campion, frequently distorts the writing of many poets: ‘it enforceth a man oftentimes to abjure his matter, and extend a short conceit beyond all bounds of art’. Another problem with rhyme, for Campion, is that it leads to ‘a continual repetition of that Rhetoricall figure which we tearme similiter desinentia’ which should be used sparingly ‘least it should offend the eare with tedious affectation’. What Campion hints at here is the way that rhyme, in addition to distorting the writer’s subject matter for the writer, distorts the reader’s access to this matter, caught up as they are in the continuing jingle of the rhymes, to the point where they hear nothing else, and are thereby rendered deaf to everything except this mechanical music, a point made more recently by Tom Raworth. It’s what made reading W.H. Auden difficult for me for years, until I developed a method of ignoring the rhyme. History, by and large, has ignored Campion – rhyming has remained the dominant tradition – but if he’d been listened to, the history of poetry in English would look very different: there’d be no Larkin, no Hardy, no Edward Thomas, little Auden, no Plath, no Porter, no Maxwell, no Armitage, no Ayres, no performance poetry. What the landscape ...