The Gendering of Rhyme: Leigh Hunt’s Effeminate Poetics in The Story of Rimini

Abstract

ABSTRACT Critics such as Samuel Johnson viewed heroic couplets as logical, rational, and masculine; others, however, imagined alternative structures in the rhyming couplet, including romance couplets and feminine rhyme, which were derided by their critics as feminine, luxurious, and perverse. Leigh Hunt’s use of feminine rhyme in the early 1800s, as well as critics’ responses to his feminine and open couplets through the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, provides an exemplary location for considering how gendered expectations appear in poetic form. Responses to Hunt’s The Story of Rimini reproduce and extend gendered discourse on the couplet form from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. At each point, even reviewers sympathetic to Hunt describe luxuriousness, self-indulgence, and “looseness” in his poetics and his use of rhyme. This article explores both how Hunt constructs alternative gender poetics throughout his poetry, and the extent to which gender and gender expectations affected the construction and reading of rhymes over the last three hundred years.