Whatever happened to rhyme?

Poems can no longer be defined as writing that rhymes. Since the 19th century with poet pioneers Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, rhyming has gone out of vogue. Nowadays few do. Most modern poems do not, at least not rhymes stuck neatly at the end of each line. There are occasionally internal rhymes, rhymes within a line, not at the end. Rarely is there a regular pattern of end-of-line rhymes. Robert Frost did it brilliantly. Edna St. Vincent Millay did it with frequent success.

The necessity of the rhyme arose in an oral culture dependent on the spoken word. Now that we write, we do not have to rhyme to make the poem accessible. Unless it adds power to the poem.  Otherwise a rhyme is nothing more than a relic.