Rhymefindr : An Historical Poetics Method for Identifying Rhymes in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry

This paper describes a new approach to rhyme identification that is grounded in the critical tradition of historical poetics. Rhymefindr comprises a set of R scripts designed to identify rhymes in nineteenth-century English poetry by operationalizing the rules presented in an 1824 edition of John Walker's A Rhyming Dictionary, one of the leading references on rhyme throughout the nineteenth century. By using an historical dictionary as a data source, Rhymefindr is sensitive to changes in pronunciation as well as changing theories about rhyme. As a corpus-independent method it can be used to identify rhymes in corpora of any size.