Naomi Levine’s The Burden of Rhyme

Description

University of Chicago Press, paperback

Publication Date: October 28, 2024

Publisher Marketing: “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”

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