1. The term is Northrop Frye's in T. S. Eliot (New York: Capricorn Books, 1972), p. 28. Since the seventeenth century, rhyme has been the more common spelling--an absurdity that came about when scholars attempted to derive the device from the Greek rhythmos (whence rhythm comes). The present study adopts this by now conventional usage in preference to the older rime , because one of its interests lies in the relation of rhyme to meter in the rhythmic construction of the poetic line. To my eye, also, the learned spelling rhyme is more acceptably familiar than the original rime.

2. Robert Creeley, "Was That a Real Poem or Did You Just Make It Up Yourself?" in American Poets in 1976 , ed. William Heyen (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1976), pp. 50-51.

3. Thomas Campion's Observations in the Art of English Poesie dates 1602; a year later Samuel Daniel's Defense of Ryme responded in statements quite similar to Creeley's. E.g., "for sure in an eminent spirit whome Nature hath fitted for that mysterie, Ryme is no impediment to [the poet's] conceit, but rather gives him wings to mount and carries him, not out of his course, but as it were beyond his power to a farre happier flight." A Defense of Rime (London, 1603); reprint ed., A. C. Sprague, ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 137-138.

4. Parker Tyler, Preface to Charles Henri Ford, ed., A Little Anthology of the Poem in Prose , in New Directions Fourteen (1953; republished by Kraus Reprint Corporation, New York, 1967), p. 336. break

1. Historical and psychological aspects of the ideal of sincerity since Romanticism are discussed in David Perkins, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964); and in Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973).

2. The fuller context of Jakobson's sentence may be useful: "The selection is produced on the base of equivalence, similarity and dissimilarity, synonymity and antonymity, while the combination, the build up of the sequence, is based on contiguity. The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence. In poetry one syllable is equalized with any other syllable of the same sequence; word stress is assumed to equal word stress, as unstress equals unstress; prosodic long is matched with long, and short with short; word boundary equals word boundary, no boundary equals no boundary; syntactic pause equals no pause. Syllables are converted into units of measure, and so are morae or stresses." The passage may be found in Roman Jakobson, "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics," in Style in Language , ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1960), p. 358. Elsewhere Jakobson writes that "equivalence in difference is the cardinal problem of language and the pivotal concern of linguistics": "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation," Selected Writings (The Hague: Mouton 1971), II, 262.

3. Since homoeoteleuton is a term that returns in the next chapter, in a context of debate, it is well at the outset to affiliate my definition with that given in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics , ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 353: "it describes similar case-endings in proximity, whether in prose or verse, e.g., in Naevius' Saturnian: 'bicorpor es Gigant es // magnique Atlant es .' When homoeoteleuton of more than one syllable occurs at the end of two or more lines in succession, it becomes rhyme. . . . It is generally agreed that homoeoteleuton and rhyme in quantitative meters were intentional, whether the effect was similar or not to that achieved by their use in the accentual verse of later Latin and of modern languages."

4. Notions of periodization in the previous paragraphs follow Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde , trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). I date continue

the birth of this paradigm at 1795, the year of Coleridge's experiment in the new mode, "Eolian Harp," and also the year of Wordsworth's recension of Descriptive Sketches , a poem that (in couplets) struggles against the whole style and ethos of the Augustan heroic couplet. Shortly thereafter follows Coleridge's "Christabel," an influential fragment in accentual measures which subverts the quantitative analogies on which Augustan form was based; Lyrical Ballads in 1798 as the first book in the new way of writing; and the manifesto of the new style in Wordsworth's 1800 Preface. The year 1795 is chosen for this break in Fredic Pottle's "Synchrony and Diachrony: A Plea for the Use in Literary Studies of Saussure's Concepts and Terminology," in Literary Theory and Structure , ed. Frank Brady, John Palmer, and Martin Price (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973).

5. Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977); the quotation on aesthetic modernity comes from p. 10. Also very useful on the subject of modernity is Herbert N. Schneidau's Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1976), esp. Chapter V.

6. Paul de Man, "Literary History and Literary Modernity," in his Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 162; ibid., pp. 161, 164.

7. David Craig, "Towards Laws of Literary Development," in David Craig, ed., Marxists on Literature: An Anthology (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1975), p. 160.

8. W. K. Wimsatt, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Knopf, 1966), p. 399.

9. W. Jackson Bate, Prefaces to Criticism (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 116-117.

10. Ibid., pp. 115-116.

9. W. Jackson Bate, Prefaces to Criticism (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 116-117.

10. Ibid., pp. 115-116.

11. Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), p. 11.

12. S. T. Coleridge, "On Poesy or Art," Biographia Literaria , ed. J. Shawcross (London: Oxford University Press, 1907), II, 258.

13. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth , ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), I, 161.

14. Ibid., III, 77.

13. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth , ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), I, 161.

14. Ibid., III, 77.

15. Charles Olson, Selected Writings , ed. Robert Creeley (New York: New Directions, 1966), pp. 17, 44. break

16. Coleridge, "On Poesy or Art," p. 262.

17. Ibid., pp. 254-255.

16. Coleridge, "On Poesy or Art," p. 262.

17. Ibid., pp. 254-255.

18. S. T. Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism , ed. T. M. Raysor (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1960), I, 198.

19. B. J. Pendlebury, The Art of the Rhyme (New York: Scribners, 1971), p. 10.

20. I refer to Viktor Zhirmunski, Rifma, ee istorija i teorija [Rhyme: Its History and Theory] (Petersburg: Academia, 1923); and Thomas Eekman, The Realm of Rime: A Study of Rime in the Poetry of the Slavs (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1974). Other twentieth-century books devoted to rhyme are Charles F. Richardson, A Study of English Rhyme (Hanover, N.H.: Printed for Classroom Use, 1909); Henry Lanz, The Physical Basis of Rime: An Essay on the Aesthetics of Sound (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1931; reprinted., New York: Greenwood Press, 1968); and B. J. Pendlebury (See n. 19).

21. Lanz, The Physical Basis of Rime .

22. W. K. Wimsatt, "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason"; collected in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), pp. 152-166.

23. Ibid., p. 156.

22. W. K. Wimsatt, "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason"; collected in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), pp. 152-166.

23. Ibid., p. 156.

24. W. K. Wimsatt, "Rhetoric and Poems: The Example of Swift," delivered at the Modern Language Association Convention in New York City, December 1974; quoted from a typescript copy loaned by the author, and used by permission of Mrs. William Kurtz Wimsatt.

25. Wimsatt, "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason," p. 160.

26. Ibid., p. 163.

25. Wimsatt, "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason," p. 160.

26. Ibid., p. 163.

27. Thanks are due to Mrs. William Kurtz Wimsatt for permission to use this portion of a letter by the late Professor Wimsatt.

28. This sentence refers respectively to Henry Lanz, The Physical Basis of Rime , and to Alastair Fowler, "The Selection of Literary Constructs," New Literary History 7, 1 (Autumn 1975), esp. 42, 53.

29. Josephine Miles, Poetry and Change (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1974), p. 21.

30. Edward Stankiewicz, "Poetic and Non-Poetic Language," Poetics-Poetyka-Poetika I , ed. Donald Davie et al. (Warsaw: Mouton with Polish Scientific Publishers, 1961), p. 16.

31. Viktor Zhirmunski, quoted by Edgar Lohner, "The Intrinsic Method: Some Reconsiderations," in The Disciplines of Criticism , ed. Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene, and Lowry Nelson, Jr. (New continue

Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 157. Zhirmunski was not one of the formalists, but his phrasing gives the essence of their position.

32. Boris Ejxenbaum, quoted by Lohner, ibid., pp. 158-159.

33. Zhirmunski's work is reassessed and brilliantly extended by Michael Shapiro, Asymmetry: An Inquiry into the Linguistic Structure of Poetry (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1976); fourth and final chapter, on rhyme, has been published as "Sémiotique de la rime," Poétique 20 (1974), 501-519.

34. Summary statement on formalism by Edgar Lohner, "The Instrinsic Method," p. 159.

35. Roman Jakobson, "Co je poesie?" Volny Smery XXX (1933-1934), 229-239; from an unpublished translation by Leon Burnett.

36. True, in the mid-1920s before their dispersal due to political pressure, the formalists produced a few statements on literary history as evolution: the theses of Tynjanov and Jakobson, depending on categories fruitfully adopted from linguistics, show how diachrony may be a relation between successive systems (Tynjanov and Jakobson, "The Problems of Literary Studies and Linguistics," [1928]). Again, arguing historically, the formalists do indicate how the long-range effect of the laying bare of devices is a demonstration that a previous canonic usage is not irrevocable. They knew that in different historical periods the same literary device could change its weighting and whole rationale. Tynjanov knew that in certain periods a careful anachronism is the most extreme form of innovation. And yet in their brief flourishing there was not time for these scholars, trained before the revolution, fully to historicize themselves. Fredric Jameson has written of the formalists with mixed sympathy for their constitutive discoveries and terminologies and disapproval of their lack, au fond , of a historical sense; see The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972).

37. Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine , 2d ed. (The Hague-Paris: Mouton, 1965), esp. Chapter XV, "Stock-Taking."

38. Letters From Joseph Conrad 1895-1924 , edited with introduction and notes by Edward Garnett (Indianapolis, Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928) p. 135.

39. O. M. Brik, "Contributions to the Study of Verse Language," in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views , continue

ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1971), p. 125.

40. See Dwight L. Bollinger, "Rime, Assonance, and Morpheme Analysis," Word 6, no. 2 (August 1950), 130.

41. Jakobson, "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics."

42. Rhyming Cockney Slang , ed. Jack Jones (Bristol, 1971).

43. "Dad's Army," a BBC Production.

44. Shapiro, Asymmetry , both quotations pp. 142-143.

45. The Poetry of Robert Frost , ed. Robert Connery Lathem (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969).

46. "Poetry and Verse," The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins , ed. Humphrey House (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 289.

47. Wimsatt, "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason," p. 155.

48. For an excellent study of "some constants in the language of lyric poetry, some fundamental forms underlying the figures of imagery and the movements of sound and rhythm" (p. vii), see Andrew Welsh, Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978).

49. Two twentieth-century schools of poetry have avoided rhyme on principle: the deep-image or surrealist school from Trakl and Neruda, Lorca and Vallejo, down to American poets like Robert Bly and W. S. Merwin; and New York School poets including Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery. The former poets rely on the image as the central vehicle of persuasion; the latter rely on pseudonarrative, zaniness with language, and direct statement. (For an instance of the latter school, see the playful hyperbole of O'Hara's "Personism: A Manifesto": "I don't believe in god, so I don't have to make elaborately sounded structures," in The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara , ed. Donald Allen [New York: Vintage Books, 1974], p. xiii.) These poets can be magnificent, but their disparagement of rhyme as an act of self-conscious virtuosity, their reliance on substitutive innovations with image and statement, are not evidence for a decline of rhyme in the twentieth century. Quite the contrary. The argument in chapter one has already accounted for their practice by speaking of the salient omission of rhyme. Under historical conditions of modernity, unrhyme has always the character of a guerrilla war against (and presupposing) rhyme. In such an era, successful rhymelessness in one sector of professional poetry always signifies rhyme's valid presence in another sector. break

1. ''Our need mocks our gear" is a phrase from Adrienne Rich's "Double Monologue," Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law: Poems, 1954-1962 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), p. 34.

2. Letters of Wallace Stevens , ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), p. 157. The letter dates August 19, 1909.

3. Mayakovsky, "A Conversation with the Inspector of Taxes About Poetry," Mayakovsky , trans. and ed. Herbert Marshall (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965), p. 353.

4. T. S. Eliot, "Reflections on Vers Libre," New Statesman , March 3, 1917, p. 519; reprinted in To Criticize the Critic (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965).

5. For example, Henry Lanz, The Physical Basis of Rime: An Essay on the Aesthetics of Sound (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1931); Martin Dodsworth's introduction to The Survival of Poetry: A Contemporary Survey , ed. Dodsworth (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), pp. 11-36; and Kingsley Amis's introduction to The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse , chosen and edited by Kingsley Amis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), esp. pp. xxi-xxii.

6. Charles Tomlinson, The Way of a World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 59.

7. J. S. Schütze, Versuch einer Theorie des Reimes nach Inhalt und Form (1802); discussed in Lanz, Physical Basis of Rhyme , pp. 161-167, esp. p. 166 for the definition here given. My phrasing, of course, neglects the practice (admired in Middle English and Old French) of "rich" rhyme, or rhyming on homonyms: two sounds and two meanings in one spelling.

8. Tomlinson's phrase is from "The Chances of Rhyme" (see n. 6); relevant studies by the linguist, Dwight L. Bollinger, and the three mentioned scholars are listed in the Selected Bibliography.

9. See Selected Bibliography for details.

10. Patrick Condon, my research assistant at the University of California, San Diego, for two months at an early stage of this essay, wrote to me in a letter: "For the fact of rhyme lends itself to particular categories of interpretation. Rhyme is, historically, manipulated as an intentional image. It is artifact, and image of its users: this both consciously and unconsciously. Consciously, rhyme is made a fighting issue between conflicting poetics and the ideologies they continue

represent. Unconsciously an orientation toward rhyme as well as its particular employment manifest a structure of perception and self-perception: not necessarily in agreement with explicit statements." This ideal of a sociology of literary form has helped focus the present inquiry.

11. There remains the possibility that these words were pronounced alike in Shakespeare's day. Henry Cecil Wyld, in English Rhyme from Surrey to Pope (London, 1923; reprinted, New York: Russell & Russell, 1965) argues that rhymes reflect the actual speech of a period and that we may deduce an earlier period's pronunciation from its literary rhymes. Pope's "tea" is pronounced "tay," in order to rhyme with "obey." But if a variety of conventional deformations are permissible in any period, as a way of extending the range of homophones, then Wyld's thesis is faulty.

12. Vladimir Nabokov, Notes on Prosody , from the commentary to his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), p. 82: "Rhyme is not a component of meter, not part of the final foot, but rather its stub or its shoe, or its spur." A similar ornamentalist view of the device, to which the present essay takes exception by showing rhyme's implication in the line, may be seen in the generative metrics of Morris Halle and S. J. Keyser, "Chaucer and the Study of Prosody," College English 28 (December 1966), pp. 187-219.

13. Perhaps the best beginnings at a notation are to be found in two articles by David I. Masson, "Vowel and Consonant Patterns in Poetry," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 12 (1953-1954), 213-227; "Sound-Repetition Terms," Poetics-Poetika-Poetyka I (Warsaw: Mouton and Polish Scientific Publishers, 1961), 189-199. Also valuable is chapter 6, "Patterns of Sound," in Geoffrey N. Leech, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (London: Longmans, 1969).

14. Harold Whitehall, "From Linguistics to Poetry," in Sound and Poetry , ed. with an introduction by Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), p. 139.

15. G. S. Fraser in Metre, Rhyme and Free Verse (London: Methuen, 1970), p. 59, writes: "Rhyme, compared to rhythm, is a simple topic. . . ."

16. Whitehall, "From Linguistics to Poetry," p. 139. John W. Draper finds "The Origin of Rhyme" in Chinese folk-poetry of the Shih Ching ; see his essay in Revue de la littérature comparée , 3 (1957), esp. 83-86. A more recent study of "repetitions of sound in continue

parallel metrical positions" finds that rhyme in classical Latin poetry is not an unintentional side effect but a conscious device, clearly described in the ancient literary theory of sound pattern and rhetorical figures: evidence that challenges the claim for vernacular invention of rhyming poetry. See Eva H. Guggenheimer, Rhyme Effects and Rhyming Figures (The Hague-Paris: Mouton, 1972).

17. William Beare, Latin Verse and European Song (London: Methuen, 1957), p. 255.

18. Ibid., p. 256.

17. William Beare, Latin Verse and European Song (London: Methuen, 1957), p. 255.

18. Ibid., p. 256.

19. March, Latin Hymns , quoted by Richardson, Study of English Rhyme , p. 22.

20. In this and the next quotation, Beare summarizes Lote's point from the latter's Histoire du vers français (1949); see Beare, Latin Verse and European Song , p. 256.

21. The definitive account of "The English Tail-Rhyme Romances," by A. McI. Trounce, may be found in four consecutive issues of Medium Aevum , beginning with Vol. I, no. 1 (May 1932).

22. Lanz, The Physical Basis of Rime , p. 53.

23. I have quoted all but the first two lines of Part I, stanza 7, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2d ed. ref. by Norman Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 4-5.

24. A fine account of Skelton's rhythms and rhymes may be found in Andrew Welsh, Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), Chapter VIII.

25. "Add to that the music of the phrase, as with a Campion, to be chosen and protected"; W. C. Williams in a "final note" on Zukofsky in Louis Zukofsky, "A" 1-12 (Ashland, Mass.: Origin Press, 1959); and see especially Williams's remarks on Campion and measure in Spectrum (1959).

26. Ben Jonson , ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), 8:184.

27. In a book of major importance, Mary Ellen Rickey has shown that Crashaw "wrote, to an unusual degree, with the end of the line particularly in mind, aiming the line" toward rhymes selected from an "extremely personal" vocabulary; see Rickey, Rhyme and Meaning in Richard Crashaw (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1961).

28. W. C. Williams, "The Pink Church," Collected Later Poems (New York: New Directions, 1950), p. 162. break

29. Seymour Chatman has demonstrated this fact in detailed comparison of couplets by Donne and Pope, "Comparing Metrical Styles," Style in Language , ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1960).

30. This is to extend Wimsatt's description of "The Augustan Mode in English Poetry": "This couplet poetry might look like a surrender to prevailing norms of clarity, distinctness, sweet reasonableness, science, and the order of nature. It was actually a polite evasion of all that. One might have thought it curious, on the face of the matter, that the great age of classical order should be at ease only in the Gothic and mystical shackles of rhyme." Wimsatt, Hateful Contraries: Studies in Literature and Criticism (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), p. 152.

31. For the definitive study of closure, which this sentence summarizes, see Barbara H. Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

32. Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology , trans. A. Lavers and C. Smith (London: Cape, 1967), p. 86.

33. W. J. Ong, "A Dialectic of Aural and Objective Correlatives," in The Barbarian Within (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 29.

34. Roman Jakobson, "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics," in Style in Language , ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1960), p. 367.

35. Hegel writes with penetration on rhyme and prosody in Philosophy of Fine Art , trans. F. P. B. Osmaston (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1920), 4: esp. 84-98.

36. Quoted, for reasons that will soon be obvious, from the version given by Henry Lanz in The Physical Basis of Rime , p. 172.

37. Ibid., p. 172.

36. Quoted, for reasons that will soon be obvious, from the version given by Henry Lanz in The Physical Basis of Rime , p. 172.

37. Ibid., p. 172.

38. Sigurd Burckhardt, "The Poet as Fool and Priest," ELH 23 (1956), p. 279. Reprinted as Chapter II of his Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

39. W. K. Wimsatt, "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason," in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1944; Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), p. 153.

40. Craig La Drière, "Structure, Sound and Meaning," in Sound and Poetry , ed. Frye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), p. 108.

41. W. K. Wimsatt, "Rhetoric and Poems," in The Verbal Icon , p. 180. break

42. Randall Jarrell, "A Well-To-Do Invalid," The Lost World (New York: Macmillan, 1965), pp. 21-23.

43. Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes , texte établi et annoté par H. Mondor et G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), pp. 466-467.

44. The above paragraph borrows terms and ideas from Roman Jakobson's definition of the poetic function; see especially "Linguistics and Poetics," p. 358.

45. Ernst Jandl, "Names," in Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology , ed. Stephen Bann (London: London Magazine Editions, 1967), p. 76.

46. From English Folk-Rhymes , collected by G.F. Northall (London, 1892; reprinted., Detroit, Mich., Singing Tree Press, 1968), p. 294.

47. Ibid., pp. 314, 285.

46. From English Folk-Rhymes , collected by G.F. Northall (London, 1892; reprinted., Detroit, Mich., Singing Tree Press, 1968), p. 294.

47. Ibid., pp. 314, 285.

48. See Dwight L. Bollinger, "Rime, Assonance, and Morpheme Analysis," Word 6, no. 2 (August 1950), 117-136.

49. English Folk-Rhymes , pp. 346-347 for the remaining counting-out rhymes quoted here.

50. By Molly Williams Wesling. The assumption is large, and requires more demonstration than I can give here, but I would hazard that such ventures are especially important, for in some sense they recapitulate the whole history of poetry.

51. Geoffrey Hartman, "The Voice of the Shuttle: Language From the Point of View of Literature," in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays, 1958-1970 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970), esp. pp. 339, 347.

52. The phrase is from W. K. Wimsatt, "Imitation as Freedom: 1717-1798," Day of the Leopards: Essays in Defense of Poems (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 118.

53. Quoted in Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine 2d ed. (The Hague-Paris: Mouton, 1965), p. 184.

54. See Victor H. Yngve, "The Depth Hypothesis," in Fred W. Householder, ed., Syntactic Theory I (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1972).

55. Jiri * Levy * , "The Meanings of Form and the Forms of Meaning," in Poetics-Poetyka-Poetika II (Warsaw: Mouton with Polish Scientific Publishers, 1966), 45-59; see p. 50.

56. Levy continues (ibid., p. 46): "Each of the three principles of arrangement on the physical level has its structural correlative in the continue

corresponding arrangement on the semantic level, since 'meaning,' too, is linear in character, if we regard it as a process, as a gradual apprehension of the sequence of semantic segments."

55. Jiri * Levy * , "The Meanings of Form and the Forms of Meaning," in Poetics-Poetyka-Poetika II (Warsaw: Mouton with Polish Scientific Publishers, 1966), 45-59; see p. 50.

56. Levy continues (ibid., p. 46): "Each of the three principles of arrangement on the physical level has its structural correlative in the continue

corresponding arrangement on the semantic level, since 'meaning,' too, is linear in character, if we regard it as a process, as a gradual apprehension of the sequence of semantic segments."

57. Wimsatt's premises have been reassessed by Hugh Kenner, "Pope's Reasonable Rhymes," ELH 41 (Spring 1974), 74-88; and by John Hollander, "Rhyme and the True Calling of Words," in Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 117-134.

58. From the opening of Canto IV, Eugene Onegin , in Pushkin Threefold , Originals with Linear and Metric Translations by Walter Arndt (New York: Dutton, 1972), p. 153.

59. Robert Graves, "A Slice of Wedding Cake," Collected Poems (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), p. 300.

60. Details of Chinese versification in this paragraph rely on teaching materials prepared by Wai-lim Yip for his classes at the University of California, San Diego. Other valuable accounts of the subject are: James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Roman Jakobson, "The Modular Design of Chinese Regulated Verse," in Échanges et communications: Mélanges offerts à Claude Levi-Strauss (The Hague-Paris: Mouton, 1970), pp. 597-605; and Hans H. Frankel, "Classical Chinese," in Versification: Major Language Types , ed. with a foreword by W. K. Wimsatt (New York: Modern Language Association, New York University Press, 1972). The definitive scholarly treatment is by Wang Li, Han-yü shih-lü hsüeh (Shanghai, 1962).

61. George A. Miller, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information," in The Psychology of Communication: Seven Essays (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 14-44.

62. Lanz, The Physical Basis of Rime , p. 235.

63. Jan M. Meijer, "Verbal Art as Interference between a Cognitive and an Aesthetic Structure," in Jan van der Eng and Mojmír Grygar, Structure of Texts and Semiotics of Culture (The Hague-Paris: Mouton, 1973), p. 318.

64. New Statesman 84, no. 2157 (July 21, 1972), 105. "When Runcorn's Gentians" is by Roy Fuller; "Pope mocked Belinda" is by Dorothy Colmer.

65. Dr. John Barrell of King's College, Cambridge, writes in a letter: "I take it the point of the Widnes-Kidneys rhyme is that in continue

Lancs it is a perfect rhyme (Widnes=Wídniz). That's why he likes northern things, or a part of the things he likes."

66. See Donald Bligh, What's the Use of Lectures ? (Harmonds-worth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 56: "When experimental psychologists give subjects a long list of words to learn, it is often found that the memory of the first and last words is much better than those in the middle. This is known as 'the bowing effect'. . . . One reason why words in the middle of the list are not remembered so well is that they suffer from proactive and retroactive interference."

67. These are the final lines of Thomas Hood, "Literary Reminiscences," published in the Comic Annual for 1833.

68. Anthony Burgess, "Viewpoint," Times Literary Supplement , May 11, 1973. Mr. Burgess does not give the couplet which contains his solution.

69. Richard E. Palmer (summarizing Heidegger's view of language), Hermeneutics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969), p. 133.

70. The thesis of this and the previous sentence is persuasively argued in Jan M. Meijer, "Verbal Art as Interference," pp. 313-348, esp. p. 329.

71. D. S. Carne-Ross, "Conversation with Robert Lowell," Delos 1 (Austin, Texas: National Translation Center, 1968), 169.

72. Pushkin Threefold , quotations from Walter Arndt's introduction, pp. xlv, xlvi, xlviii.

73. Trente-cinq jeunes poétes Américaines , traduction, préface, et choix par Alain Bosquet (Paris: Gallimard, 1960): Lowell, pp. 324-325; Berryman, pp. 212-213. Bosquet's Lowell also misses any equivalent for "climacteric," which gives paradoxical dignity to the rhyme word "want," which it controls. Robert Lowell's English is quoted from Life Studies (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1959), p. 88. John Berryman is quoted from his Short Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967), p. 114.

74. William McGonagall, "Saving a Train," from Yet More Comic and Curious Verse , collected by J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1959), p. 117.

75. My thanks to Dr. Judith Saunders for the copy of this poem.

76. The passages quoted are from John Manier, "Tribute to John F. Kennedy," Primitive Poems (privately printed, 1966); teenage girl in the comic book June and Pixie , London, May 4, 1974. break

77. Marianne Moore, Predilections (New York: Viking Press, 1955), p. 8.

78. Collected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid , rev. ed. with enlarged glossary prepared by John C. Weston (New York and London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 320-321.

79. Letters of Wallace Stevens , pp. 351-352. The letter dates January 12, 1940.

80. Roger Shattuck's phrase in the introduction to his translation of Selected Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire (New York: New Directions, 1971), p. 21. Apollinaire is of the same historical moment as the English and American poets discussed here: to note, with Shattuck, that he "redefined the way in which rimes are masculine and feminine," and that he audaciously rhymes "singulars with plurals, stems with composite forms, words with themselves, and simple component sounds with any vaguely similar sound," is to describe the typical modernist extension, not the abandonment, of the device.

81. W. H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957 (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 229.

82. Kenneth Rexroth, Collected Shorter Poems (New York: New Directions, 1966), p. 3.

83. Norman Nicholson, A Local Habitation (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 19.

84. "E-Pluribus-Unum," Chastisement: The Last Poets , Blue Thumb Records, 1972.

85. Edward Dorn, Slinger (Berkeley, Calif.: Wingbow Press, 1975); first passage from the end of "The Cycle," second from the beginning of "Book III of the Winter Book."

86. Viktor Zhirmunski, Introduction to Metrics: The Theory of Verse , trans. C. F. Brown, ed. E. Stankiewicz and W. N. Vickery (The Hague-Paris: Mouton, 1968), p. 238 (translation of Vvedenie e metriku; teoriia stikha [Leningrad, 1925]).

87. John Logan "The Girl in the Fog," The Anonymous Lover (New York: Liverright, 1973), p. 75.

88. Paul Kparsky "The Role of Linguistics in a Theory of Poetry," Daedalus 102, 3 (Summer 1973), 232.

89. W. S. Merwin, The Carrier of Ladders (New York: Athenaeum, 1971), p. 50.

90. This is to quote only the transition in the middle of "The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo," Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins , ed. W. H. Gardner, 3d ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 97. break

91. Both quotations from Book I, part ii, W. C. Williams, Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1946-1951).

92. James Schuyler, The Crystal Lithium (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 61-62.

93. Recorded, under November 19, 1816, by Benjamin Robert Haydon in his Autobiography , ed. Edmund Blunden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927).

1. The phrase belongs to David Antin, "Some Questions about Modernism," Occident 8, n.s. (Spring 1974), 28. My thanks to William Shu-sam Tay and Ying-hsiung Chou for their information and advice on matters relating to Chinese literature; however any errors in chapter three are solely attributable to me.

2. Feng Chih (b. 1905), from Sonnet XXVII, The Sonnets , 1941, English version from Twentieth Century Chinese Poetry: An Anthology , trans. and ed. Kai-Yu Hsu (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1964), p. 155.

3. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass , Readers' Edition, ed. Harold W. Bodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York: New York University Press, 1965), p. 714.

4. Modern Chinese Poetry: Twenty Poets from the Republic of China, 1955-1965 , selected, translated, and with an introduction by Wai-lim Yip (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1967), pp. 49, 65, 104, 129, 152, 168.

5. Ibid., pp. 84, 96.

4. Modern Chinese Poetry: Twenty Poets from the Republic of China, 1955-1965 , selected, translated, and with an introduction by Wai-lim Yip (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1967), pp. 49, 65, 104, 129, 152, 168.

5. Ibid., pp. 84, 96.

6. Murray Krieger, "Contextualism and the Relegation of Rhetoric," in Donald C. Bryant, ed., Rhetoric and Poetic (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1965), esp. pp. 46-47.

7. S. T. Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism , ed. T. M. Raysor (London: Dent, 1960) I, 197. Though, as Raysor notes, these sentences are "based directly on Schlegel" (p. 197n), this does not render their content any less Coleridgean; Coleridge steals ideas he agrees with.

8. For a hostile account of the concept of organic form, see W. K. Wimsatt, "Organic Form: Some Questions about a Metaphor," in Day of the Leopards: Essays in Defense of Poems (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976). On selective organicism in continue

Wimsatt and the New Critics, see Paul de Man, "Form and Intent in the American New Criticism," in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).

9. Noam Chomsky, "The Current Scene in Linguistics: Present Directions," in David A. Reibel and Sanford A, Schane, eds., Modern Studies in English: Readings in Transformational Grammar (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 10-11.

10. A tentative formulation of a new rhetoric "that would no longer be normative or descriptive but that would more or less openly raise the question of the intentionality of rhetorical figures," is Paul de Man's "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Charles S. Singleton, ed., Interpretation: Theory and Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969). For a synoptic treatment of French structuralist neorhetoric, see Tzvetan Todorov, Poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1973).

11. See Wai-lim Yip, "Yen Yü and the Poetic Theories in the Sung Dynasty," Tamkang Review 1, no. 2 (October 1970), esp. 188 on Huang T'ing Chien.

12. Thomas DeQuincey, "Rhetoric," Collected Writings , ed. David Masson (London: A. & C. Black, 1897) X, 97.

13. Fredric Jameson, "Criticism in History," in Norman Rudich, ed., The Weapons of Criticism (Palo Alto, Calif.: Ramparts Press, 1976), pp. 31-50.

14. Harry Levin, "Notes on Convention," in Harry Levin, ed., Perspectives of Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 73.

15. Claudio Guillén, "A Note on Influences and Conventions," in Literature as System: Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 62-65.

16. Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973).

17. Claudio Guillén, "Second Thoughts on Literary Periods," in Literature as System , p. 445.

18. Bonnie S. McDougall, The Introduction of Western Literary Theories into Modern China: 1919-1925 (Tokyo: The Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1971).

19. Chow Tse-tung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 15. break

20. One model for such a theory in the human studies is Thomas S. Kuhn's account of the shifts in research paradigms in the natural sciences; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , 2d ed. enl. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

21. See Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Unmediated Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954).

22. Gérard Genette, Figures I (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 262-263; my translation.

23. Further attested by the title of a new journal, boundary 2, a journal of postmodern literature , Binghamton. Presumably the second boundary is the new historical break that divides modernism from its aftermath.

24. Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology , trans. A. Lavers and C. Smith (London: Cape, 1967), pp. 86-88. See also, on this break between classical and modern writing, Barthes's Writing Degree Zero , trans. A. Lavers and C. Smith (London: Cape, 1967), passim, and Mythologies , trans. A. Lavers (London: Paladin, 1972), esp. pp. 133-134.

25. W. B. Yeats, Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1953), p. 94.

26. A. Alvarez, The Savage God (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 17.

27. In Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey, eds., Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 270.

28. Wen I-to, Twentieth Century Chinese Poetry , pp. 65-66.

29. For notions in this sentence and several other details in this paragraph I have relied on Cyril Birch, ''English and Chinese Meters in Hsü Chih-mo's Poetry," Asia Major , n.s., 8, part 2 (1961), 258-293, esp. 276-279.

30. Birch (ibid., p. 277) introduces full English syntax in his literal translation: "But scraps of brass may hue to turquoise (sic), / Peachblossoms flower from rusting cans, / The greasy scum weave a texture of gauze / And a tinted haze steam up from the germs." Though I cannot accept Birch's application of English metrical terminology to Chinese (usually it does not explain English verse; how much less helpful with Chinese!), I have adopted his division of syllables because it has its origin in remarks of Wen I-to himself. Literal translation of Chinese characters, with transliterations above, kindly supplied to me by Ying-hsiung Chou. break

29. For notions in this sentence and several other details in this paragraph I have relied on Cyril Birch, ''English and Chinese Meters in Hsü Chih-mo's Poetry," Asia Major , n.s., 8, part 2 (1961), 258-293, esp. 276-279.

30. Birch (ibid., p. 277) introduces full English syntax in his literal translation: "But scraps of brass may hue to turquoise (sic), / Peachblossoms flower from rusting cans, / The greasy scum weave a texture of gauze / And a tinted haze steam up from the germs." Though I cannot accept Birch's application of English metrical terminology to Chinese (usually it does not explain English verse; how much less helpful with Chinese!), I have adopted his division of syllables because it has its origin in remarks of Wen I-to himself. Literal translation of Chinese characters, with transliterations above, kindly supplied to me by Ying-hsiung Chou. break

31. Wen I-to is quoted in Kai-Yu Hsu, "The Life and Poetry of Wen I-to," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 21 (1958), 134-179; see p. 151.

32. Paul de Man, "Literary History and Literary Modernity," in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 144.

33. See, for definitions of terms, Robert Abernathy, "Rhymes, Non-Rhymes, and Antirhyme," in To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday , (The Hague-Paris: Mouton, 1967), 1:1-14.

34. Selected Poems of H.D. [Hilda Doolittle] (New York: Grove Press, 1957), p. 26.

35. Gottfried von Neifen, ca. 1240, first three lines of poem xxxii (five stanzas), in C. v. Kraus, Deutsche Liederdichter des 13. Jahrhunderts , bd. 1; text (Tuebingen, 1952), p. 115 f. My thanks to Martin Wierschim for advice on these MHG texts.

36. Walter von der Vogelweide, poem L47, lines 16-21, in K. Lachmann, C. v. Kraus, H. Kuhn, Die Gedichte Walthers von der Vogelweide (Berlin, 1965), p. 66.

37. Gottfried von Neifen, ca. 1235, poem v in Kraus, Deutsche Liederdichter , p. 87 f. This is the complete second stanza of a five stanza poem.

38. Roman de la rose , XX, 955. Quoted by Pierre Guiraud, Les sources médiévales de la poésie formelle: la rime (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1952), p. 20. This inaugural lecture can also be found in Guiraud's Essais de stylistique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1969).

39. Quoted from Leys d'Amors , by Guiraud, Les sources médiévales , p. 21.

40. Ibid., this and the next quotation from p. 3.

39. Quoted from Leys d'Amors , by Guiraud, Les sources médiévales , p. 21.

40. Ibid., this and the next quotation from p. 3.

41. Henry Lanz, The Physical Basis of Rime An Essay on the Aesthetics of Sound (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1931), p. 55.

42. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land , lines 117-124, in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1964), pp. 40-41.

43. D. H. Lawrence, "Bavarian Gentians," in The Poems of D. H. Lawrence , collected and edited with an introduction and notes by Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (New York: Viking Press, 1964), 2:697.

44. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1971), p. 93. break

45. Robert Creeley, For Love, Poems 1950-1960 (New York: Charles Scribner's and Sons, 1962), p. 79.

46. Mercian Hymns is printed in full in Geoffrey Hill's Somewhere is Such a Kingdom: Poems 1952-1971 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971).

47. Calvin Bedient, Eight Contemporary Poets (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. x.

48. Josephine Miles, Prefabrications (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), p. 47.

49. Juri Tynjanov and Roman Jakobson, "Les problèmes des études littéraires et linguistiques," in Théorie de la littérature , trans. Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 1965), pp. 138-139: my translation.

50. This is the final stanza of Philip Larkin's "Money," High Windows (London: Faber and Faber, 1974).

51. From the third of Davie's "Six Epistles to Eva Hesse," Collected Poems (London: Routledge, 1972), pp. 260-261. "And now's the time / To venture a Defense of Rhyme" begins a long section which argues that rule keeping in rhyme "makes the rhymed forms open ones," while ''Total freedom in the fiction / Is of all the worst constriction."

52. Robert Bridges: Poetry and Prose , ed. John Sparrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 123-124.

53. E. E. Cummings, "POEM, OR BEAUTY HURTS MR. VINAL," Poems: 1923-1954 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954), pp. 167-168.

54. Rhyme, and "meter as meter and not as the essential of the work, one of its words," Williams considered as "complicated ritualistic forms designed to separate the work from 'reality'": W. C. Williams, Spring and All (West Newbury, Mass.: Frontier Press, 1971), p. 23. And yet, carefully, Williams used rhyme; see below for instances from Paterson .

55. George Saintsbury, History of English Prosody , vol. 3, appendix iv, "Rhyme, 1600-1900" (London, 1910; reprinted, New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), p. 539.

56. "Scenting in every corner the chances of rhyme" (line 6) Charles Baudelaire, "Le Soleil," Oeuvres complètes , texte établi et annoté par Y-G. Le Dantec (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 155; my italics. Walter Benjamin's study is titled Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism , trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973). break

57. Charles Tomlinson, The Way of a World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 59.

1. W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970); and Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

2. Paul de Man "Form and Intent in the American New Criticism," in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 25.

3. Quoted from E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 32.

4. Graham Hough, An Essay on Criticism (London: Duckworth, 1966), p. 158.

5. One might propose the usefulness of a book that would study not so much particular forms as the idea of forming since, say, 1660--with chapters describing several phenomena of an era of stylistic pluralism after 1795, including sprung rhythm, the prose poem, and the prosodies of free verse.

6. Henri Meschonnic, Pour la poétique: Essai (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 30; my translation.

7. New Critics on Longinus: Allen Tate, "Longinus and the 'New Criticism,'" in The Man of Letters in the Modern World (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), pp. 175-192; W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, "Roman Classicism: Longinus," in Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Knopf, 1966), pp. 99-111. Both these books are sustained meditations on the evils of expressionism. A response to such a position, especially as found in the aesthetic theories of W. K. Wimsatt's frequent collaborator Monroe Beardsley, may be found in Guy V. Sircillo, Mind and Art: An Essay on the Varieties of Expression (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972).

8. Marx W. Wartofsky, "Art As Humanizing Praxis," Praxis I, 1 (Spring 1975), 60.

9. Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory," New Left Review 82 (November-December 1973), 15.

10. The quotation is from Murray Krieger, A Window to Criticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), p. 57. break