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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... attempt to fore- stall , or at least acknowledge , the puzzled reactions of readers : The Fourth Book of Virgil ... attempts to satisfy the requisites of this " strange meter " brought a new sound into English poetry . Surrey's partial ...
... attempts to write in " a form suggested by the eclogues of Virgil ... luckily ( I consider it ) in no vain attempt to Anglicize Virgil's versification , dactylic hexameter . " As one can see from the boy's en- jambments , he had yet ...
... attempting to reclaim certain types of material from these other modes of transmission , should poetry attempt to be a similar , less - nuanced sort of medium ? That evidently is Simpson's strategy , and to many it will seem as self ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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