Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and UseBlank verse--unrhymed iambic pentameter--is familiar to many as the form of Shakespeare's plays and Milton's Paradise Lost. Since its first use in English in the sixteenth century, it has provided poets with a powerful and versatile metrical line, enabling the creation of some of the most memorable poems of Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Frost, Stevens, Wilbur, Nemerov, Hecht, and a host of others. A protean meter, blank verse lends itself to lyric, dramatic, narrative, and meditative modes; to epigram as well as to epic. Blank Verse is the first book since 1895 to offer a detailed study of the meter's technical features and its history, as well as its many uses. Robert B. Shaw gives ample space and emphasis to the achievements of modern and postmodern poets working in the form, an area neglected until now by scholarship. |
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... X X / X / X / X / But the majestic river floated on , | / X X / X X / Out of the mist and hum of that low land , | / x X / x / X / / Into the frosty starlight , | and there moved , | x / x X x / X X Rejoicing , through the hushed Chorasmian ...
A Guide to Its History and Use Robert Burns Shaw. X / X / X / x / x x / And split his currents ; | that for many a league .X X / x / x / x / The shorn and parceled Oxus strains along X X / X / x / x / Through beds of sand and matted ...
... X / X X X X / / ( x ) While still my temples ached from the cold burning X X / X / X // x Of hail and wind , and still the primroses X X X / x / X / Torn by the hail were covered up in it , x / X X / X X The sun filled earth and heaven with ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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