Bouts-rimés

bouts-rimés, (French: “rhymed ends”), rhymed words or syllables to which verses are written, best known from a literary game of making verses from a list of rhyming words supplied by another person. The game, which requires that the rhymes follow a given order and that the result make a modicum of sense, is said to have been invented by the minor French poet Dulot in the early 17th century. Its wide popularity inspired at least one notable tour de force, an extended satirical poem by the French poet Jean-François Sarasin, entitled Dulot vaincu (1654; “Dulot Defeated”). The fad was revived in the 19th century when Alexandre Dumas père invited French poets and versifiers to try their skill with given sets of rhymes and published the results in 1865.

In 19th-century England, John Keats is said to have produced his charming poem “On the Grasshopper and Cricket” (1816) in a bouts-rimés competition with his friend Leigh Hunt. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82) and his brother William tested their ingenuity and improved their rhyming facility by filling in verses from bouts-rimés. Most of William’s poems in the Pre-Raphaelite magazine The Germ were bouts-rimés experiments.