Abstract Rhetoric is a vital element in modern poetry, and plays an essential role in improving its aesthetics. However, to date, it has not been considered in research on automatic poetry generation. In this paper, we propose a rhetorically controlled encoder-decoder for modern Chinese poetry generation. Our model relies on a continuous latent variable as a rhetoric controller to capture various rhetorical patterns in an encoder, and then incorporates rhetoricbased mixtures while generating modern Chinese poetry. For metaphor and personification, an automated evaluation shows that our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by a substantial margin, while a human evaluation shows that our model generates better poems than baseline methods in terms of fluency, coherence, meaningfulness, and rhetorical aesthetics.