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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... conversational style of these examples represents only one of a spec- trum of styles in which the meter has been successfully employed . Once again , let us leave scansion aside for the moment and sample some of this stylistic range in ...
... conversational speech in Shakespeare . Juliet's nurse rambles on in recalling how old Juliet is : Even or odd , of all days in the year , Come Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen . Susan and she ( God rest all Christian souls ...
... conversational note is even more pronounced in Wordsworth , who fa- mously asserted that a poet is “ a man speaking to men , ” 23 and , in a passage that numerous critics ( including Coleridge ) took issue with , " that there neither is ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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