To Rhyme Is Human

To have a theory of the long-established practice of prosody (that is, of versification and the rest of the poetic art) was once a gentleman’s decent avocation. As Paul Fussell observed in his study of the subject, in the eighteenth century, “prosodic theorizing was an activity in which many of the finest minds of the period participated … and the widespread interest in verse structure drew prosodic treatises from a horde of minor out-at-elbows schoolmasters, penny-a-line critics and Grub-streeters, and genteel country curates. Even Thomas Jefferson somehow found time to pen a hurried essay on the subject.”