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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... Yeats's forays into dialect ) . His language can be blunt , but it is not that of the common man , and Yeats did not wish it to be . Another difference between Frost and Yeats is in tonal range . While Frost avowed an interest in ...
... Yeats's other poems on the same subject , it has affecting moments despite its braving of anachronism . The intriguing narra- tive " The Gift of Harun Al - Rashid " allegorizes Yeats's marriage and celebrates his wife as medium and muse .
... Yeats grew impatient with this languorous style . In later work he was frequently willing to vary rhythms strikingly ... Yeats's achievement as a dramatist . It was one of many tools he employed , and he made less use of it as he refined ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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