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LII Mrs. Browning's Rhymes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Fred Manning Smith
Fred Manning Smith*
Affiliation:
West Virginia University
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Extract

For many years critics have been finding fault with Mrs. Browning's rhymes. Asserting that she “richly deserves the place generally accorded her as the foremost poetess of England,” that her Sonnets from' the Portuguese take “rank with Shakespeare's Sonnets and Rossetti's House of Life as one of the three great English sonnet cycles,” that “some of her social poems seem written in blood,” that she is at times “not only original but an equal of the greatest,” and that “her poem ‘The Great God Pan’ is almost perfect,” yet critics repeat the Victorian criticism of her rhymes. Saintsbury considers her “proficient in all the qualities which distinguish the poet from the prose-writer with the exception of ear for rhyme”; and this is what he says of these rhymes: “The dullness or falseness of her ear for consonance of sound was quite unparalleled, and she, with all the advantages of gentle birth, feminine sex, country breeding, and an almost scholarly education, confuses rhymes in a manner usually supposed to be limited to the lower class of cockneys.” Other critics have said her rhymes are “inadmissible,” “eccentric,” “illegitimate,” “slovenly false,” “vicious,” “feeble and commonplace,” “careless and perverse,” “painful,” “really shocking,” and that “few, if any, poets have sinned more grievously or frequently against the laws of metre and rhyme.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , September 1939 , pp. 829 - 834
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1939

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References

1 Lieder, Lovett, and Root, British Poetry and Prose (Boston, 1928), p. 1243.

2 Moody and Lovett, History of English Literature (New York, 1920, 1930), p. 367.

3 Woods, Watt, Anderson, The Literature of England (New York, 1936), ii, 726.

4 Emile Legouis, Short History of English Literature (Oxford, 1934), p. 344.

5 H. J. C. Grierson, Lyrical Poetry of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1929), p. 83.

6 George Saintsbury, Short History of English Literature (London, 1898), p. 738.

7 Ibid., p. 738.

8 Edgar Allan Poe's essay, Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (New York, 1845).

9 E. C. Stedman, Victorian Poets (Boston, 1887, 1896), p. 126.

10 W. T. Arnold in Ward's English Poets (London, 1897), iv, 564.

11 Edmund Gosse, Critical Kit-Kats (London, 1896), p. 9.

12 Oliver Elton, Survey of English Literature (New York, 1920), iii, 401.

13 Hugh Walker, Age of Tennyson (London, 1914), p. 235.

14 W. H. Hudson in John Buchan's History of English Literature (New York, 1923), p. 489.

15 Grierson, op. cit., p. 84.

16 G. F. Reynolds, English Literature in Fact and Story (New York, 1929), p. 351.

17 Sir Henry Jones, in the Cambridge History of English Literature (New York, 1917), xiii, 79.

18 Elton, op. cit., p. 401.

19 See also the rhymes of Wilfred Owen, whom Day Lewis considers an “ancestor” of the new group. C. Day Lewis, A Hope for Poetry (New York, 1935), pp. 163–164.

20 So Untermeyer speaks of MacLeish. Louis Untermeyer, Modern British and American Poetry, Fifth Revised Edition (New York, 1936), p. 499.

21 Letters of E. B. Browning to R. H. Home (London, 1877), p. 264.

22 The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. by F. G. Kenyon (New York, 1899)] i, 184.

23 It should be understood that throughout this paper I am giving only a few examples of rhymes that are commonly found in the poems of Mrs. Browning, MacLeish, Auden, and Day Lewis; in most instances many more could be cited. In other poets an imperfect rhyme might be found but it would be rare. Baum notices “a few famous examples”: Wordsworth' robin: sobbing, sullen: pulling; Tennyson's with her: together, valleys: lilies; Keats's youths:soothe, pulse:culls; Swinburne's lose him: bosom: blossom. Pauli F. Baum, The Principles of English Versification (Cambridge, 1929), p. 175. For other examples in earlier poets, see C. F. Richardson, “Morals of the Rhyming Dictionary,” Yale Review, ii, 269–281.

24 George R. Stewart, The Technique of English Verse (New York, 1930), p. 173.

25 Louis MacNeice, Modern Poetry (Oxford, 1938), pp. 130–133.

26 Firkins says “Emerson's rhymes are often pitiable.” O. W. Firkins, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1915), p. 277.

27 O. W. Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1885), p. 327.

28 E. C. Stedman, Poets of America (Boston, 1885), p. 135.

29 William Cairns, History of American Literature (Oxford, 1912), p. 235.

30 Fred L. Pattee, Century Readings in American Literature (New York, 1919, 1932), p. 337.

31 See Ludwig Lewisohn, Expression in America (New York, 1932), p. 358; and Anna M. Wells, “Early Criticism of Emily Dickinson,” American Literature, i, 251.

32 Fred L. Pattee, The New American Literature (New York, 1930), p. 198.

33 Clement Wood, Poets of America (New York, 1925), p. 83. See also Susan Miles, “The Irregularities of Emily Dickinson,” The London Mercury, xiii, 145–158.

34 See Percy H. Boynton, Literature and American Life (New York, 1936), p. 697.

35 Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (Boston, 1924), p. 239.

36 Ibid., p. 244.

37 Ibid., p. 83.

38 Op. cit., p. 699.

39 Sheldon Cheney, Expressionism in Art (New York, 1934), p. 407.