Achebe's comment on Rhyme

[dukealien]

Achebe wrote in a critique:

The combination of iambic tetrameter, couplet form, and end stoped lines doesn't work so well. It's hard not to sound cliched and staccato as a result, particularly because all perfect rhymes in rhyme poor English have been done to death.

Yet everyone is always very pleased with internal rhyme, assonance, and alliteration - of which end-rhymes are only a special case.  It's sort of like the 1959 (I think it was) Chevrolet, which - with only a set of options that could be printed in a small catalog - could produce a number of distinct combinations larger than the number of particles in the universe.  (Some, it's true, very ugly and unwanted.)  If I had to critique the critics of (end-)rhyme (or even of forms) I might say they're annoyed by rules generally, not the limitations and lack of surprise they allege.

As for iambic tetrameter, I read long ago that it's a sort of genetic characteristic of English that serious poetry falls out in iambic pentameter while comic poetry sorts itself into tetrameter.  This is obviously a huge generalization; it would be interesting to compare with English poetry written by subcontinent Indians, whose spoken English is distinctively accented, or writers whose mother-tongue is one of the Chinese tonal dialects.

Bottom line:  I don't know, maybe "Don't fight the language in which you're writing?"  Or maybe use judo or aikido on it, directing its offensives in a direction of your choice with minimum force.