Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 78-11(E), Section: A.

Advisers: David Scott Kastan; David Quint; John Rogers.

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"The Fetters of Rhyme" focuses on the political stakes of poetic form between 1590 and 1670. Long before the English fought a civil war over the meaning of liberty, poets were debating about the benefits of constraint and the risks of bond-breaking. Early modern poets imagined rhyme as a band or fetter and argued that rhyme was an analogue for the bonds that tie individuals to political, social, and religious communities. The charged nature of early modern forms is particularly visible in the dynamic history of the couplet: in the 1590s, poets like John Donne took up the Chaucerian couplet to signal their sexual and political radicalism, but by the middle of the seventeenth century Royalist poets had co-opted the couplet as a tool for reinforcing affective ties to king and country. Using archival research and prosodic analysis to recover the surprising associations early modern readers attached to forms like couplets, sonnets, and stanzas, "The Fetters of Rhyme" demonstrates how reading poetic form historically can yield fresh insights into the complexities of early modern verse.

The opening chapters of the dissertation consider how stanzas and couplets became weapons in an Elizabethan culture war that pitted defenders of convention and order against advocates of natural liberty. In chapter one, which focuses on Edmund Spenser's Amoretti, I consider how Spenser's distinctive interwoven rhyme schemes reflect his belief that the unruliness of human desires must be restrained by conventional and coercive bands. The second chapter argues that Donne and his youthful companions rebelled against their poetic elders by reimagining the Chaucerian pentameter couplet, an outmoded form they associated with the cultural and political liberty the English enjoyed before the importation of burdensome continental conventions. They contended that the antiquated form, with its loose meter and enjambed lines, allowed them to restore verse to its proper function as a forum for free, argumentative discourse.

In the third chapter, I consider Ben Jonson's efforts to find a middle way between restraint and liberty. Jonson shared the Elizabethan conviction that the couplet was particularly conducive to rational discourse, but he disciplined the licentious couplet by regularizing its meter and combining it with classical genres like the ode. Rejecting the boundless liberty of Donne and his fellows, Jonson carved out a circumscribed space for ethical liberty that was protected from the vicissitudes of court politics. In doing so, he developed concepts of lyric freedom and a separate poetic sphere that would be taken up and reinterpreted by the subsequent generation of poets.

The final section of the dissertation explores the ways in which poets on both sides of the English Civil War manipulated Jonson's poetic legacy. The fourth chapter argues that Royalist poets like Robert Herrick, Katherine Philips, and Abraham Cowley, adopted the measured Jonsonian couplet but modified the theory of rational liberty that undergirded his preference for the form. Instead, they maintained that rhyme's chime transcends reason and appeals to the natural affections. Because the couplet's ringing sound and orderly structure give it a mysterious power to sway the hearts of listeners, they argued, it was an ideal vehicle for restoring the conventional bonds to family and property that bolstered the monarchy. The particular combination of formal and philosophical commitments that emerged in the Royalist verse of the mid-seventeenth century anticipates many features of the modern understanding of the lyric: an interest in the mystical charms of verse was accompanied by an increased dedication to representing the private, the particular, and the affective.

The final chapter takes a fresh look at Milton's famous renunciation of rhyme in Paradise Lost in light of the long history of debate about the politics of rhyme traced in my project. Although in his prefatory note on the "The Verse" Milton depicts himself as a poetic radical throwing off the fetters of "Custom" and offering the first example "in English, of ancient liberty recover'd to Heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing," he draws on arguments that Donne, Hall, and Marston had marshalled decades before in defense of the libertine couplet. In fact, Milton's understanding of poetic liberty is in many ways less radical and less disruptive than that of his Elizabethan predecessors. In his effort to craft a style distinct from the affective lyrics of the Royalists, Milton fuses the metrical discipline of Jonson with the flowing enjambment of Donne. The result is a peculiarly Miltonic prosodic style in which dedication to liberty of expression is accompanied by a painstaking attention to the rules of poetic measure.