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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... become clear that it would be foolish to assume any topic ruled out . Classical notions of decorum , which deemed certain poetic forms proper for treating certain subjects , have never had much staying power among poets of the English ...
... become an endless catalogue . Populous as it has become , this account of blank - verse writers in the first half of the twentieth century has one conspicuous gap . The next ( and final ) section of this chapter will undertake to fill ...
... become too dramatic , we must enter a caveat . Poetic rhythms can suggest qualities of feeling or imitate movement , but they do this only in conjunction with the words they animate . In themselves , rhythms and meters are abstract ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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