Naomi Levine’s The Burden of Rhyme is a highly original and luminously written reframing of Victorian literary history, one that promises to shape our understanding of nineteenth-century poetry for years to come. Against the New Critical disdain for historical poetics that still informs our understanding of Victorian poetry, Levine resurrects a lost nineteenth-century culture of rhyme in which form was wed to history. Poetic form, she shows, was the site of intense Victorian debate, conviction, and fantasy about literary history: whether arguing over the possible Arabic and Persian origins of rhyme, detailing theories about how the unvoiced iambs of an English line record personal and historic loss, or elaborating ideas about the medieval eroticism encoded in end rhyme, the Victorians felt the past in their poetry. To feel it with them, Levine argues, we need to expand our own methodological habits, emulating the “empathic erudition” whereby the Victorians fused emotion and learning. Levine is a superb storyteller, and following her as she recounts the minutiae of these Victorian debates is improbably and genuinely thrilling. It is also deeply moving: just as Levine shows how Victorian literary historiography helped poets and critics perceive and create poetic emotions, her research into overlooked nineteenth-century conversations revivifies the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Morris, and Coventry Patmore. This is scholarship in the service of readerly feeling, andThe Burden of Rhyme is a transformative and profound book.
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