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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... examples of blank verse that are not only colorful but downright gaudy . ) Absence of rhyme , at first re- garded as a detriment , came to be appreciated as a strength once poets learned to make use of the liberty it afforded . Verse ...
... examples , he deplores " [ a ] perpetual hobble , as it were , in the pace ; an ever - officious obstacle and blocking in the wind - stroke or the oarage of poetry . In the worst examples of all , even more unpleasant metaphors suggest ...
... examples , see William H. Robinson Jr. , ed . , Early Black American Poetry ( Dubuque , IA : Wm . C. Brown Company , 1969 ) . This anthology includes even earlier examples , such as Phyllis Wheatley's " To the University of Cambridge ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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