The Artificial Life of Rhyme

Abstract

Taking up Philip Sidney’s brief but provocative claim that the “chief life” of modern verse “standeth in that like sounding of words, which we call rhyme,” “The Artificial Life of Rhyme” asks what it might have meant to locate something called “life” in the notoriously conspicuous piece of artifice called rhyme. By coupling a study of early modern poetic and rhetorical theory with a close reading of the Maleger episode in book 2 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene , this essay argues that the Spenserian stanza acts as an engine of resurrection in a battle that ties the art of poetic production to the heretical longevity of Arthur’s foe. In conclusion, this essay proposes that artifice as its most conspicuous--literary ornament--also acted as cause, both material and formal, of early modern poiesis .

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