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.