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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 15
... five lines . This might lead us to expect that line 83 would be a tetrameter , in keeping with the odd , individualized pattern that appears to be forming . But no , rather than being shorter than a regular blank - verse line , this one ...
... five stanzas of five lines apiece ; it is also con- structed as a single sentence ( though some would say Berryman fudges a bit by having recourse to a colon in stanza 3 ) . The tense , almost overstrained quality of the speaker's ...
... five or six , Why have you pulled the rubber suction cup From off your arrow and begun to sharpen it ? ( 21-26 ) Other provocative pieces in this vein include " Man of the Century , " " Days of Labor , " " Berlin - to - Baghdad ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
2 other sections not shown