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©2015 Naomi Grierson Levine ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ©2015 Naomi Grierson Levine ALL RIGHTS RESERVED RHYME AND HISTORY IN VICTORIAN POETICS by NAOMI GRIERSON LEVINE A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School – New Brunswick Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English written under the direction of Carolyn Williams and approved by _________________________ _________________________ _________________________ _________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2015 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Rhyme and History in Victorian Poetics By NAOMI GRIERSON LEVINE Dissertation Director: Carolyn Williams This dissertation argues that Victorian experiments with rhyme grew out of a broader cultural fascination with the literary historical myths found in contemporary aesthetics and historiography. Although rhyme has come to be regarded as an unsophisticated sound effect, for Victorians it provoked urgent questions about the relationship between past and present, the importance of national and ethnic identity, and even the nature of human experience. In nineteenth-century literary historical prose, the advent of rhyme signaled the beginning of the modern European literary tradition and, by extension, the emergence of modern subjectivity. Its origins were consequently a matter of passionate dispute. Through a range of formal techniques from stanzaic patterning to assonance to blank verse, poets entered live debates about rhyme: whether it began in the East or West, how it moved into English literature, whether it signified spiritual achievement or cultural decline, and how it registered in the mind and body. Drawing on a rich archive of prose written and read by Victorian poets but largely neglected now, I show that nineteenth- century conceptions of literary history were not identical with our own. To understand Victorian poetic forms, this dissertation proposes, we need to think less about literary history as a stable category and more about a proliferation of competing literary historiographies. Thus, “Rhyme and History in Victorian Poetics” takes up recent ii challenges to think historically about literary form, but it does so by recovering the nineteenth-century assumption that forms and histories are necessarily entwined. This study engages with current scholarship on prosody, the history of literary criticism and aesthetics, Victorian transnationalism, and literary formalisms as it reconstructs a nineteenth-century canon of rhyme theories. Individual chapters show Arthur Hallam mining Arabist historiography for evidence of rhyme’s affective powers; Alfred Tennyson using Provençal poetics to reinvent the lyric stanza; Elizabeth Barrett Browning devising a capacious “rhymatology” that encompasses even epic blank verse; and Coventry Patmore building a new form of ode out of a historiographic theory of pauses. iii Acknowledgements I am grateful to my committee for years of generous mentorship and inspiring conversations. Carolyn Williams gave me both constant guidance and a huge amount of freedom to figure out what I wanted this dissertation to be. Jonah Siegel has been supporting me and challenging me to think harder since my first classes with him. I have learned so much from both Carolyn and Jonah – not only about the nineteenth century but also about how to be in love with intellectual work. Meredith McGill introduced me to historical poetics in my first semester at Rutgers, and conversations I had with her about poetic theory, especially as I read for my exams, were formative. Meredith Martin has been involved with this project since well before she was on my committee; I’ve been benefiting from her generous insights for a long time now. Thanks to many other teachers and advisors at Rutgers -- especially John Kucich, David Kurnick, Billy Galperin, Colin Jager, and Dianne Sadoff. I was in a writing group with Mark DiGiacomo, Emily Zubernis, and Vivian Kao, and I got so much from their input and solidarity. Thanks to a cohort of brilliant Victorianist friends at Rutgers and elsewhere: Anne Terrill, Amanda Kotch, John Miller, Matt Sherrill, Patrick Chappell, Simon Reader, Justin Sider, and Michael Hansen. Thanks also to Josh Gang and Debrapriya Sarkar. And thank you to Cheryl Robinson and Courtney Borack for countless kindnesses. This project has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Department of English, the Center for Cultural Analysis, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. I worked with archival materials at the Armstrong Browning Library in Waco, TX; the iv British Library in London, England; and the Archivio di Stato di Pescia in Pescia, Italy. Many thanks to the archivists, librarians, and scholars at those institutions. A version of chapter three is forthcoming in MLQ, and it has benefited from the editorial wisdom of Marshall Brown, V. Joshua Adams, Joel Calahan, and Michael Hansen. Dear friends in Montreal and Toronto have cheered me through the last year of writing: Heather Hayes, Claire Hurtig, Rochelle Ross, François Dansereau, Harry Herbert, Christine Paglialunga, Josh Katz-Rosene, Laura Fisher, and Ali Qadeer. Ron Blumer and Muffie Meyer made New York / New Jersey feel like home while I lived there. Thanks above all to my family. To my siblings, eternal loves of my life, JJ and Marielle; and my beloved step-siblings, Zoe and Dylan. Thanks to David Levine, Sharon Chambers-O’Neill, and Marti and Ray Ellermann for love and support. My stepmother Penny was a crucial writing companion in the last months of this project. My dad’s enthusiasm, sympathy, curiosity, and kvelling have meant so much to me. He always believed this was a worthwhile endeavor. This dissertation is for him. My mother, Susan Schouten Levine, is all over this project. When I was little, she taught me to memorize poems that she knew by heart, she told me that I was a writer and that I needed to keep writing, and she filled my childhood with beautiful things. I still miss her. In millions of ways, Greg has contributed to this work. He has read all of it (some of it many times), he listened to me talk about it both exultantly and despairingly, he lent me so much of his knowledge about Romanticism and so much of his amazing brain. He helped me especially with the impossible task of revision, allowing me see my work v freshly and differently. He brought me tea, coffee, food. He worked beside me, even when he didn’t have to. He has celebrated every little achievement with me. His love has been a constant part of my grad school experience and has made that experience completely unlonely. Thank you, Greg. vi Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgments iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1, Arthur Hallam and the Origin of Rhyme 13 Chapter 2, Tennyson’s Lyric Forms 55 Chapter 3, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Unblank Verse 90 Chapter 4, Coventry Patmore and the Idea of Ode 117 Works Cited 153 vii 1 Introduction This dissertation is about the shaping power of origin stories, about the ways that Romantic and Victorian theories of literary history influenced the forms of Victorian poems. My study embraces a variety of nineteenth-century genres and forms—lyric, ode, blank verse, the sonnet, the stanza, the metrical line, the pause—but at its heart is rhyme. Indeed, I argue that all of these genres and forms, and many more, were drawn into the surprisingly rich imaginary of Victorian rhyme. Efforts to reconcile formalist and historicist reading practices have tended to emphasize either the immediate cultural contexts in which literary forms circulated or the relationships of individual works to prior models. “Rhyme and History in Victorian Poetics” presents a different vision of forms in historical time. I argue that Victorian poets’ ways of thinking about form were shaped not simply by literary history (e.g. an awareness of early modern ballads or Petrarchan sonnets; an engagement with Wordsworth or Milton), but by literary historiography: the origin stories about poetic forms that constituted a nineteenth-century mythology of poetry. These narratives were mediated through a wide range of popular and erudite genres—public lectures, critical essays, poetry anthologies, book reviews—but they emerged most forcefully in dedicated works of literary historiography, the multivolume studies that attempted to synthesize the literary traditions of nations, continents, or the world. Such works are now rarely read; literary scholarship turned away long ago from the totalizing aspirations they appeared to represent. Yet they provide extraordinary insight into the intellectual conditions in which Victorian poems were made. “Rhyme and History in Victorian Poetics” measures the 2 reverberations of literary historical thinking in nineteenth-century poetic theory and the poetry to which it gave rise. Thus, it offers not only a prosodic history of the nineteenth century but also a study of the historical fantasies about form that informed Victorian poems. Although rhyme has been strikingly undertheorized in contemporary poetics, it held a privileged place in nineteenth-century histories of poetry.1 Its particular story was also the story of literary historical development writ large. For Romantic historiography, the medieval invention of rhyme marked an unbreachable division between classical and modern poetics; rhymed forms such as the Arabic and Persian ghazele, the Provençal canzone, and the Italian sonnet brought with them new modes of identity and relationship that changed the course of literary and human history. In the English context, the shifting fortunes of rhyme helped account for the shifting tastes and practices that differentiated 1 There is a small canon of theoretical work on rhyme, and it has mostly revolved around Alexander Pope and the intellectual operations of the eighteenth-century couplet. See for, example, William K. Wimsatt’s “One Relation of Rhyme to Reason” (1944) and Hugh Kenner’s “Pope’s Reasonable Rhymes” (1974). For more recent treatments of the couplet, see J. Paul Hunter’s “Formalism and History: Binarism and the Anglophone Couplet” (2006) and Simon Jarvis’s “Why Rhyme Pleases” (2011).
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