Voice, Rhyme, and Aesthetic Injustice

Abstract Some lines of poetry rhyme to certain readers and not to others because of how their words are pronounced in different accents. And because the accent in which a person speaks is tied in significant ways to aspects of their social identity (such as their age, race, gender, and class), some poems rhyme in the voices of the privileged and not in the voices of the disadvantaged. This paper argues that appreciators can incur aesthetic harms when they are excluded from participating in aesthetic goods that are more fully available to others, and that these harms can constitute aesthetic injustices when they are part of a wider pattern of socio-economic hardship. Poems that embody objectionable gatekeeping practices can thus perpetuate aesthetic injustice.