The Ends of Rhyme: Swinburne's "A Century of Roundels" and Late-Victorian Rhyme Culture

Valuing art over chance and the poet's intentions over unintentional effects were fundamental aesthetic hierarchies for many English Parnassians, whose regard for rhyme emerged from a more fundamental endorsement of art and technique. [...]Gosse argues that to write fixed forms successfully, the poet must use skill to hide his or her effort so that the poem exemplifies a Popean "ease," lest the poem's form distract from the poet's ideas: [...]what makes verse elegant is that it seems "smooth" and "light": unforced, easy, effortless. [...]when Swinburne suggests that by reading a roundel the reader experiences "sound unsought" and "music unsought," he not only describes the reader's "pleasure in the unexpected patterns of sound . . . and in the mischievous and skillful 'cunning' with which the poet orchestrates them," as Kuduk Weiner argues (p. 21). [...]Swinburne suggests that the roundel exemplifies the poet being at once master and slave of rhyme in order to deconstruct Pope's influential binary of art and chance. First postulated by John Morley in 1866 and canonized by T. S. Eliot in 1920, English critics have long condemned Swinburne's verse for seeming motivated not by his ideas but rather by sound, which results in words without meaning: thoughtless, nonsense verse.