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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... Schwartz gives his lines the jouncing , start - and - stop movement of a streetcar . Such is not Schwartz's invariable practice : the thirty - four - line piece " I Am to My Own Heart Merely a Serf , " for example , is largely regular ...
... Schwartz's rhythms and the moody atmos- phere of this Depression lyric . ( The rhythms do seem , if not " tired , " at least drowsy . ) What is certainly demonstrable is that Schwartz , like many of his contemporaries , was affected by ...
... Schwartz , Shenandoah , in Poetic Drama , ed . Alfred Kreymborg ( New York : Modern Age Books , 1941 ) . The alternation of prose with verse passages makes cita- tion by line numbers impractical in this case . 2. Delmore Schwartz ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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