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).