| "The Warrant for Rhyme" offers evidence that British poets, beginning in the latter half of the seventeenth century, changed their rhyme practices pursuant to an ideology concerning what they took to be rhyme's essential purpose. Speaking broadly, we may say they decommissioned rhymes pairs wherein the two participating words were synonyms or antonyms of each other. I argue that poets did this because they more or less unconsciously believed rhyme's power lay in its contribution to a poem's non-rational allure. I compare (taking my cue from Coleridge) the desired effect of rhyme to that of a drug. I seek to show that the Augustan poets intuited that this "drug" effect might be disturbed or at least interrupted by the installation of rhyme pairs wherein the two words bore to each other any essential semantic link. The unconscious ideal was that the two words should be linked by sound alone. |
