This essay approaches the instable boundaries between verse and prose by examining the revival of rhythm in literary and critical theory as a figure that encompasses both bound or unbound aesthetic forms and social states of bondage or liberation. The essay examines one especially influential example of rhythm’s extension beyond verse and prose in Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). It argues that Horkheimer and Adorno treat rhythm on both sides of modernity as an ambivalent figure and instrument of subjection. I show that by extrapolating the tactus of rhythmical beating across a vast historical, aesthetic, and social field, Horkheimer and Adorno perpetuate a notion of rhythm’s political affordances while also obscuring its status as a transmedial aesthetic form. Finally, I account for recent reassessments of Adorno’s politics of rhythm in Black Studies, a field that opens other avenues for thinking rhythmic irregularity beyond the verse-prose nexus and in relation to histories of social violence and dispossession.