The Burden of Rhyme - by Naomi Levine (Hardcover)

About the Book

"The Burden of Rhyme gives a new account of Victorian poetry and its place in the field of literary studies. A work of historical poetics, it shows how nineteenth-century notions about the origin of rhyme shaped the theory and practice of poetry in the period. For Victorians, rhyme was not (as it was for the New Critics) a mere technique or ahistorical form. Rather, Naomi Levine argues, it carried rich historical associations, harkening to a vividly imagined medieval past. Victorian poets thus had in rhyme a sensitive historiographic instrument, one they could use to activate ideas about love, loss, longing, poetry, and modernity. The Burden of Rhyme will appeal to readers of Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Morris, and even Ezra Pound, as well as scholars working in the history of criticism"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"This book productively challenges how we think about literary historiographies, intrinsic versus extrinsic devices, and the limitations of affect, ultimately showcasing poetic feeling as something more fundamental [...] than we have been trained to admit."-- "MLQ"

"A book of outstanding scholarship and often scintillating criticism. . . . The Burden of Rhyme is a deeply rewarding and important book. To readers and scholars of Victorian poetry, it will be of particular value, as it offers a means of accounting for what seemed to twentieth-century critics (as well as some later ones) to be the period's excessive formality and sentiment. But the book's lessons extend well beyond the specific field of Victorian poetry. To the extent that the stories it tells--about the relation of form to history; about the roots of our current critical practice in New Criticism's reaction against the genetic formalism of the previous century--are fundamental to our self-understanding as literary critics, Levine's compelling book will find readers across the discipline of literary studies."-- "Modern Philology"

"A profound contribution to our understanding of this historical dimension to poetics. . . . The Burden of Rhyme attunes us to how rhyme struck the ears of Victorian readers in a way that confounds the text and technique-centred praxis of New Criticism as it simultaneously exposes the inadequacies of the supposedly antithetical ambitions of New Historicism's emphasis on context and theory. . . . The Burden of Rhyme will immediately become an essential and enduring reference-point for scholars working on Victorian poetry, and it should become so also for the field of poetics at large."-- "The Review of English Studies"

"One of a surprising number of recent studies of rhyme from fresh angles. . . . Non-academic readers of poetry with an interest in rhyme (and some poets too, I think) will find plenty here to chew on."-- "First Things"

"This book begins with the premise that Victorian poets often express a dual orientation of affective and historical themes, an orientation Levine calls 'genetic formalism, ' . . . This book's six chapters contend that 'a critical capacity for feeling and thinking about history and form together' was widespread in the Victorian period among poets, historians, and theorists of poetry. . . Recommended."-- "Choice"

"Levine breaks new ground in studies of Victorian poetry and literary history with her conceptualization of genetic formalism--a nineteenth-century theory and practice of poetry that looked to romantic poetry's transhistorical, multicultural developmental processes as part of poetic form. Levine dares to see feeling, both the reader's necessary feeling into poetry understood in this unfamiliar way and rhyme's feeling after its partner rhyme, as integral dimensions of reading Victorian poetry--especially since human desire and couplings were understood as inhabiting Arabist and Troubadour poetry that introduced rhyme to modern poetry. The Burden of Rhyme is without question the most important study of Victorian poetry to appear in more than a decade."-- "Linda K. Hughes, Texas Christian University"

"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"

About the Author

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