Naomi Levine

I am a scholar of poetry and poetics, aesthetics, and the history of criticism, specializing in the nineteenth century. My first book, The Burden of Rhyme: Victorian Poetry, Formalism, and the Feeling of Literary History (Chicago, 2024) 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 literary studies. I’m currently at work on a second book project, “Badness in Poetry,” which begins from twentieth-century evaluative criticism and its reception of nineteenth-century poems. In theorizing and historicizing the aesthetic category of “badness,” this project considers the entanglements of judgment, pleasure, and interpretation in the study of poetry more broadly. I have additional research and teaching interests in the relationship between literature and visual art and the concept of period style. 

My essays have appeared in MLQ, Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, Victorian Literature and Culture, Literature Compass, and Victoriographies. I contributed a chapter to the volume Literature as Sound Studies on the way Victorian poetry sounded in 1929. 

At Yale, I have taught courses in the history of poetry (ENGL 1025 and 1026), a class on elegy (The Art of Losing), advanced seminars on Love and Desire in the Nineteenth Century, a senior seminar on the nineteenth-century figures of the Poetess and the Woman of Letters, and a graduate seminar called The Badness of Victorian Poetry.

Before coming to Yale, I was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Selected Publications

The Burden of Rhyme: Victorian Poetry, Formalism, and the Feeling of Literary History (University of Chicago Press, 2024)

“Victorian Poetry, Heard and Unheard” in Literature as Sound Studies, ed. yasser elhariry and Liesl Yamaguchi (Bloomsbury, 2025)

“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,” Modern Language Quarterly 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)

updated August 2025