Naomi Levine

I work on Victorian literature, poetry and poetics, literary historiography, and the history of criticism. My research explores the relationship between formal and historical conceptions of poetry in the nineteenth century and after. I am completing a book manuscript called “The Burden of Rhyme,” which examines nineteenth-century ideas about the origin of rhyme and their significance for the theory and practice of Victorian poetry and for the development of close reading. I’m also at work on a related project, “The Badness of Victorian Poetry,” about twentieth-century evaluative criticism and its reception of nineteenth-century poems.

My essays have appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, Victoriographies, Victorian Literature and Culture, MLQ, and Literature Compass. Before coming to Yale, I was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

At Yale, I have taught introductory poetry classes, a course on elegy (The Art of Losing), a junior seminar on Love and Desire in the Nineteenth Century, and a graduate seminar called The Badness of Victorian Poetry. In Spring 2022, I am teaching ENGL 126 and a senior seminar called The Poetess and the Woman of Letters.

Selected Publications

“Understanding Poetry Otherwise: New Criticism and Historical Poetics,” Literature Compass 17.7 (2020)

“Rhyme,” Keywords issue, Victorian Literature and Culture 46.3/7 (2018)

“Tirra-Lirrical Ballads: Source Hunting with the Lady of Shalott,” Victorian Poetry 54.4 (2017)

“Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Historiographical Poetics,” MLQ 77.1 (2016)

“Victorian Pearl: Tennysonian Elegy and the Return of a Medieval Poem,” Victoriographies 6.3 (2016)

“Trebled Beauty: William Morris’s Terza Rima,” Victorian Studies 53.3 (2011)