The Fetters of Rhyme

The Fetters of Rhyme
Author: Rebecca M. Rush
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2024-12-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 069121784X

How rhyme became entangled with debates about the nature of liberty in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poetry In his 1668 preface to Paradise Lost, John Milton rejected the use of rhyme, portraying himself as a revolutionary freeing English verse from “the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming.” Despite his claim to be a pioneer, Milton was not initiating a new line of thought—English poets had been debating about rhyme and its connections to liberty, freedom, and constraint since Queen Elizabeth’s reign. The Fetters of Rhyme traces this dynamic history of rhyme from the 1590s through the 1670s. Rebecca Rush uncovers the surprising associations early modern readers attached to rhyming forms like couplets and sonnets, and she shows how reading poetic form from a historical perspective yields fresh insights into verse’s complexities. Rush explores how early modern poets imagined rhyme as a band or fetter, comparing it to the bonds linking individuals to political, social, and religious communities. She considers how Edmund Spenser’s sonnet rhymes stood as emblems of voluntary confinement, how John Donne’s revival of the Chaucerian couplet signaled sexual and political radicalism, and how Ben Jonson’s verse charted a middle way between licentious Elizabethan couplet poets and slavish sonneteers. Rush then looks at why the royalist poets embraced the prerational charms of rhyme, and how Milton spent his career reckoning with rhyme’s allures. Examining a poetic feature that sits between sound and sense, liberty and measure, The Fetters of Rhyme elucidates early modern efforts to negotiate these forces in verse making and reading.

Pindaric Metre: The 'Other Half'

Pindaric Metre: The 'Other Half'
Author: Kiichiro Itsumi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 485
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199229619

Pindar is one of the greatest Greek poets, but while the metre of half of his poems is easy to grasp, that of the other half has so far remained obscure. Kiichiro Itsumi presents a new account of their metre. He separates the metre into two types and identifies a series of precise entities from which the verses are made, in this way imposing a new clarity and discipline on what had previously seemed a much vaguer process. Itsumi's analyses of individual poems include a discussion ofstanzaic structure, of textual problems, and of particular lines in the stanza and their exploitation within the text. These analyses will be an invaluable resource for serious scholars of Pindar.

The Oxford History of Poetry in English

The Oxford History of Poetry in English
Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 577
Release: 2024-08-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198930232

The Oxford History of Poetry in English (OHOPE) is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. OHOPE both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. By taking as its purview the full seventeenth century, 1603-1700, this volume re-draws the existing literary historical map and expands upon recent rethinking of the canon. Placing the revolutionary years at the centre of a century of poetic transformation, and putting the Restoration back into the seventeenth century, the volume registers the transformative effects on poetic forms of a century of social, political, and religious upheaval. It considers the achievements of a number of women poets, not yet fully integrated into traditional literary histories. It assimilates the vibrant literature of the English Revolution to what came before and after, registering its long-term impact. It traces the development of print culture and of the literary marketplace, alongside the continued circulation of poetry in manuscript. It places John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips and other mid-century poets into the full century of specifically literary development. It traces continuity and change, imitation and innovation in the full-century trajectory of such poetic genres as sonnet, elegy, satire, georgic, epigram, ode, devotional lyric, and epic. The volume's attention to poetic form builds on the current upswing in historicist formalism, allowing a close focus on poetry as an intensely aesthetic and social literary mode. Designed for maximum classroom utility, the organization is both thematic and (in the authors section) chronological. After a comprehensive Introduction, organizational sections focus on Transitions; Materiality, Production, and Circulation; Poetics and Form; Genres; and Poets.

The Oxford History of Poetry in English

The Oxford History of Poetry in English
Author: Laura L. Knoppers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 577
Release: 2024-08-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198852800

Beginning with the last years of the reign of Elizabeth I and ending late in the seventeenth century, this volume traces the growth of the literary marketplace, the development of poetic genres, and the participation of different writers in a century of poetic continuity, change, and transformation.