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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... attention without distracting us by its artifice . Our attention thus engaged , we are reminded of the collaboratively creative nature of conversation , which is human drama in itself . Other animals communicate . Only we converse , and ...
... attention — and certainly the attention of the reader prepared to witness a new world being made . In other passages we notice how the pauses , so effectively deployed or withheld in an action passage like that of Satan's voyage , can ...
... attention sharply on the one bird flying . It becomes an emblem for all who wished desperately to escape " the evil waste of history " that was Europe in the thirties and forties . Although he was a few years younger than Berryman ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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