Naomi Levine is assistant professor of English at Yale University. This is her first book.

"A book of outstanding scholarship and often scintillating criticism. . . . The Burden of Rhyme is a deeply rewarding and important book. To readers and scholars of Victorian poetry, it will be of particular value, as it offers a means of accounting for what seemed to twentieth-century critics (as well as some later ones) to be the period’s excessive formality and sentiment. But the book’s lessons extend well beyond the specific field of Victorian poetry. To the extent that the stories it tells—about the relation of form to history; about the roots of our current critical practice in New Criticism’s reaction against the genetic formalism of the previous century—are fundamental to our self-understanding as literary critics, Levine’s compelling book will find readers across the discipline of literary studies."

• IntroductionPart I: Genetic Formalism: A Theory and Its Histories1: Old Historicism, New Criticism, and the Feeling in Form2: Arthur Hallam and the Origins of RhymePart II: Historiographic Forms3: Alfred Tennyson’s Lyric Stanza4: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Unblank Verse5: William Morris’s Fleshly Rhymes6: Coventry Patmore’s Passionate PauseConclusion: The Spirit of RomanceAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

Naomi Levine is assistant professor of English at Yale University. This is her first book.

"A book of outstanding scholarship and often scintillating criticism. . . . The Burden of Rhyme is a deeply rewarding and important book. To readers and scholars of Victorian poetry, it will be of particular value, as it offers a means of accounting for what seemed to twentieth-century critics (as well as some later ones) to be the period’s excessive formality and sentiment. But the book’s lessons extend well beyond the specific field of Victorian poetry. To the extent that the stories it tells—about the relation of form to history; about the roots of our current critical practice in New Criticism’s reaction against the genetic formalism of the previous century—are fundamental to our self-understanding as literary critics, Levine’s compelling book will find readers across the discipline of literary studies."

• IntroductionPart I: Genetic Formalism: A Theory and Its Histories1: Old Historicism, New Criticism, and the Feeling in Form2: Arthur Hallam and the Origins of RhymePart II: Historiographic Forms3: Alfred Tennyson’s Lyric Stanza4: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Unblank Verse5: William Morris’s Fleshly Rhymes6: Coventry Patmore’s Passionate PauseConclusion: The Spirit of RomanceAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

Naomi Levine is assistant professor of English at Yale University. This is her first book.

"A book of outstanding scholarship and often scintillating criticism. . . . The Burden of Rhyme is a deeply rewarding and important book. To readers and scholars of Victorian poetry, it will be of particular value, as it offers a means of accounting for what seemed to twentieth-century critics (as well as some later ones) to be the period’s excessive formality and sentiment. But the book’s lessons extend well beyond the specific field of Victorian poetry. To the extent that the stories it tells—about the relation of form to history; about the roots of our current critical practice in New Criticism’s reaction against the genetic formalism of the previous century—are fundamental to our self-understanding as literary critics, Levine’s compelling book will find readers across the discipline of literary studies."

• IntroductionPart I: Genetic Formalism: A Theory and Its Histories1: Old Historicism, New Criticism, and the Feeling in Form2: Arthur Hallam and the Origins of RhymePart II: Historiographic Forms3: Alfred Tennyson’s Lyric Stanza4: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Unblank Verse5: William Morris’s Fleshly Rhymes6: Coventry Patmore’s Passionate PauseConclusion: The Spirit of RomanceAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex