ABOUT THIS BOOK

A major new account of Victorian poetry and its place in the field of literary studies.

The Burden of Rhyme shows how the nineteenth-century search for the origin of rhyme shaped the theory and practice of poetry. For Victorians, rhyme was not (as it was for the New Critics, and as it still is for us) a mere technique or ahistorical form. Instead, it carried vivid historical fantasies derived from early studies of world literature. Naomi Levine argues that rhyme’s association with the advent of literary modernity and with a repertoire of medievalist, Italophilic, and orientalist myths about love, loss, and poetic longing made it a sensitive historiographic instrument. Victorian poets used rhyme to theorize both literary history and the most elusive effects of aesthetic form. This Victorian formalism, which insisted on the significance of origins, was a precursor to and a challenge for twentieth-century methods. In uncovering the rich relationship between Victorian poetic forms and a forgotten style of literary-historical thought, The Burden of Rhyme reveals the unacknowledged influence of Victorian poetics—and its repudiation—on the development of modern literary criticism.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Naomi Levine is assistant professor of English at Yale University. This is her first book.

REVIEWS

“In The Burden of Rhyme, Levine elegantly and convincingly lifts the burden we labor under when we believe that formalist and historicist approaches to poetry are opposed. She does so by doing a deep dive into the sometimes quirky, sometimes fantastic Victorian search for the historical origins of poetic forms. The Victorians, she reveals, viewed forms as the manifestations of history, and in no case was that clearer than in their love of rhyme, which embodied the history of love itself. Revelatory and relevant to all scholars and readers of poetry and of the history of literary criticism, The Burden of Rhyme speaks to anyone interested in how we might, as Levine says, ‘reimagine the relationship between scholarly knowledge and the ineffable charisma of a poem.’”

— Adela Pinch, University of Michigan

“This impassioned and creative scholarship gives us access to a felt history of rhyme in Victorian poetry that, its author argues, was displaced by the formalism of the New Critical project. We reconnect with a rich nineteenth-century culture of rhyme, a culture whose deep scholarship located rhyme in European and non-European histories alike—troubadour, Arabic, Norse, Greek. Above all, this lost tradition valued affect and saw rhyme as the vehicle of desire, feeling, love. Levine’s work will transform our reading of Victorian poetry.”

— Isobel Armstrong, University of London

“This trimly learned, compellingly written study will earn admiring thanks from scholars pursuing a broad range of interests: British Victorian poetry, the European practice of literary historiography on either side of 1800, twentieth-century criticism and theory in the anglophone academy, and the work of poetic rhyming as a once pervasive, if now largely unsuspected, enactment of literary modernity dating from the Middle Ages into our time.”

— Herbert F. Tucker, University of Virginia

TABLE OF CONTENTS