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
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... Stevens requires a section to himself for several reasons . First , there is the level and breadth of his achievement . Stevens was one of the most pro- lific writers of blank verse among the modernists of his generation , and some of ...
... Stevens's imposingly extended sentences , often overriding the bounds not merely of a few lines but of several tercets . A nagging feeling may eventually accost some readers , a suspicion that the later Stevens is more interested in ...
... Stevens to Morton Dauwen Zabel , March 13 , 1933 , in Letters of Wallace Stevens , ed . Holly Stevens ( New York : Knopf , 1966 ) , 265 . 56. Gross , Sound and Form , 245 . 57. Ibid . , 243 . 58. Donald Justice , " The Free - Verse Line ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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