The Fetters of Rhyme

Liberty and Poetic Form in Early Modern England

Rebecca M. Rush

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780691217840
  9780691212555
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691215686
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1: Sweet Be the Bands: Spenser and the Sonnet of Association
• CHAPTER 2: Licentious Rhymers: Donne and the Late Elizabethan Couplet Revival
• CHAPTER 3: An Even and Unaltered Gait: Jonson and the Poetics of Character
• CHAPTER 4: Rhyme Oft Times Overreaches Reason: Measure and Passion after the Civil War
• CHAPTER 5: Milton and the Known Rules of Ancient Liberty
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index