Charles Baxter: Learning from the Poets: Rhyming Action (and Unity of Imagery) (July 1996)

Charles Baxter explores how “rhyming action,” as exemplified in narrative poems by Coleridge, Shelley and others, can work in fiction, taking the form of dramatic or imagistic echoes. The most effective types of rhyming action, Baxter argues, cannot be consciously contrived but are generated imaginatively between conscious intent and sub-conscious impulse, creating a formal unity distinct from historical progression that carries recursive insight, as shown in work by Twain, Joyce, Rilke, Nabokov, Munro and others.