Re: very rare, at least

I am not in a good position to judge Schiller's poems as poetry, but I think the words combine very well with Beethoven's music.

And I continue to be a fan of end-rhymes. I tend to think of the period from about 1940 to 2000 as a terrible error in poetry. I know that rhymes are not everything, but I consider them as an important part of the connection between poetry and music.

Unfortunately, substandard poets may have made rhymes look trite, because they forced rhymes where they should not have, and paid little attention to the many other contributing factors to good poetry - such as meaningful content, metaphor, rhythm, alliteration, and the general sound of the piece. We also lose something of the experience when we look at the printed page, because of differences in local dialect (geographically or chronologically) that are not apparent from the written form.

For example, when William Blake wrote "Tiger Tiger. burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye. Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" - the final syllable of "symmetry" rhymed with "eye" (and in a few smaller dialects of English, "eye" may still rhyme with the now standard pronunciation of "symmetry").

Good poetry should never sound forced. It should sound like it just happened to fall out of the mouth in perfect form. Admittedly, even great poets rarely hit that mark - but it remains the ideal.

English does have a term half rhyme, sometimes called by other names such as slant rhyme, near rhyme, or imperfect rhyme. This would include pairs such as hail/fall and ripped/kept. Wilfred Owen went a little further and included only such pairs that shared initial consonants, such as shell/shall and ripped/wrapped.

Personally I like the more formal types of poetry, but concede that there are very few poets who can write consistently good formal poetry, and almost none who can write consistently great formal poetry (and furthermore the two groups seldom overlap). When it is done right, however, it is magical.