Positive as sound : Emily Dickinson's rhyme
In this thorough analysis of Dickinson's rhyming practices, Small demonstrates that the poet's ostensibly erratic, even bizarre, rhymes are purposeful, and that they not only enhance meaning but direct it. Considering her rhyming technique in the light of its historic context, Small argues that Dickinson's innovations were both an outgrowth of 19th century aesthetic ideas about the music of poetry and a reaction against conventional constraints. She shows how Dickinson's modulations and dislocations of rhyme serve to structure the poems and contribute to their dynamic shifts of mood and meaning; and how she achieved uncanny effects with fluctuating partial rhymes in some poems, and with homonymic puns in others. Small contends that Dickinson's enduring appeal comes from a fusion of the musical and written aspects of her language. ISBN 0-8203-1227-4: $35.00
xiii, 261 pages ; 23 cm
9780820312279, 0820312274
20596064