Lucy Hutchinson, gender and poetic form.

While Milton famously rejected rhyme in Paradise Lost, the Genesis poem by his contemporary Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, is in rhymed couplets. This article asks how Hutchinson used the couplet, how her couplets were read by the seventeenth-century readers who encountered her work, and whether the manuscript of her poem can be treated as evidence of how poetic regularity and irregularity were coded with political and gendered meanings in the seventeenth century, and how differently they are so today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]