Rhyme’s Crimes
This article shows how rhyme came to be devalued critically. It argues that formalist methodologies alone cannot explain why rhyme once dominated and then fell in importance. Nor can formalism save rhyme by pointing to the reasons why humans enjoy it or by showing how it adds to poetry’s value. Instead, in historicist fashion, I focus on how political factors have determined the meaning of rhyme in the last three hundred years. I link rhyme’s fall to a series of ideological disavowals that tied the technique to subject positions deemed unfree. From political conservatism and aristocracy to femininity, childishness, and popular vulgarity, rhyme was positioned in aesthetic discourse as a device not fit for liberal professors of poetry. The case of rhyme illustrates that literary form can never be abstracted from the political contests by which culture is riven.
Byron: Augustan and Romantic
The impact of Byron's writings - an evaluative approach, William St Clair "My brain is feminine" - Byron and the poetry of deception, Jerome J. McGann Byron and the romantic heroine, Malcolm Kelsall Byron and the Empire in the East, Marilyn Butler Byron Augustan - mutations of mock-heroic in "Don Juan" and Shelley's "Peter Bell the Third", Claude Rawson continuities and discontinuities of language and voice in Dryden, Pope, and Byron, Bernard Beatty Augustan satires and Panegyrics on London and Byron's image of the city, Michael Gassermeier Byron, Pope, and the Grand Tour, Michael G. Cooke Byron in Italy - the return of Augustus, Donald H. Reiman "Don Juan" transformed, Anne Barton Byron's "Wrong Revolutionary System" and romanticism, Hermann Fischer the quintessential Byron, Leslie A. Marchand.
Pope's Reasonable Rhymes
The pun, which we used to be told was the lowest form of wit, is also the completest form of rhyme. Not merely the vowels, not merely the terminal consonants, but every phoneme in two words will coincide. When Quintilian teaches us the Greek word homoioteleuton-" like ending "-the closest thing in his rhetorician's armory to what we experience as rhyme, and then disconcerts us a little by classifying it with the pun, which he calls "C a poor trick even when employed in jest," ' he helps us frame a suspicion that the poet of rhyme is playing with fire, flirting with triviality and unworthy coincidence, and justifying John Milton's stern aversion from the mere exploitation of syllabic accident.2 The problem with such effects seems to inhere in their look of randomness. The centuries-old objection that one's point should not depend on a pun seems related to the principle that a plot should not depend on a coincidence. A coincidence, being uncaused, tells us nothing, and we expect of the humblest story, as of the humblest verse, some increment of enlightenment. From the very first pun we used to learn as children-" When is a door not a door? WThen it's ajar "-we may recall learning nothing at all about doors, not even the answer to the question, and if we do learn a fact about the English language we may reject it as an annoying fact. Why should a synonym for " open " make that idiotic chime with the name of a kitchen receptacle? It seems a flaw in linguistic design, to be tacitly overlooked. So with rhyme, we may feel. If " ajar" and " a jar" is unworthy, does not the pair " glade " and " shade " verge on a like unworthiness? Or " descends " and " ends "? Or " twines " and