Reasoning Rhyme

Back in the dim and distant past, as a Linguistics student, I wrote an Honours dissertation on rhyme. It grew out of my reflection on rhyme practice as a reader and nascent writer of poetry and developed into a critque of a PhD thesis on rhyme by a Dutch linguist, Astrid Holtman.

It struck me about four years ago that my blog would be a good place to revisit some of the material, leaving aside the more linguistic theoretical aspects of the dissertation and focussing on the stylistics. So I created a thread of posts exploring this and reflecting further on rhyme.

That was my old Blogger weblog. I’ve now moved these posts over into this section of the website. (You can still view the original posts and comments on them here, but I’d really appreciate it if any new comments were made in this section of the present site.) At some point, I intend to revisit, tweak, redraft and extend the series, so keep your eye on it, but don’t hold your breath.

You can navigate through the posts using the links below.

• The Intolerable Wrestle With Words
• Making it New
• More Complex Phenomena
• To Begin at the Beginning: the Role of the Onset 1
• To Begin at the Beginning: the Role of the Onset 2
• Response to Tiel Aisha Ansari’s Objections 1
• Response to Tiel Aisha Ansari’s Objections 2
• Lightness that Drew Me: Rhyme in Gaelic
• Supplement 1: On the Features of Consonants

Happy reading!