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Bouts-Rimés

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Also known as Bouts-Rimes

Bouts-Rimés (French, literally 'rhymed-ends') is the name given to a kind of poetic game defined by Addison in the Spectator as "lists of words that rhyme to one another, drawn up by another hand, and given to a poet, who was to make a poem to the rhymes in the same order that they were placed upon the list".

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Bouts-Rimés (French, literally 'rhymed-ends') is the name given to a kind of poetic game defined by Addison in the Spectator as "lists of words that rhyme to one another, drawn up by another hand, and given to a poet, who was to make a poem to the rhymes in the same order that they were placed upon the list".

The more odd and perplexing the rhymes are, the more ingenuity is required to give a semblance of common sense to the production. For instance, the rhyme scheme breeze, elephant, squeeze, pant, scant, please, hope, pope is submitted, and the following stanza is the result:

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Bouts-Rimés” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.