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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... experience by many years . Unlike Sassoon , he managed to outgrow his initial labeling . He is now more likely to be identified with romantic and mythological themes than with the horrors of war . ( At times during his career his prose ...
... experience — are familiar , but his handling of them is remarkably fresh . The complementary energy of language and versification stands out . Here are some lines in which the protagonist , Matthew Stanton , recalls his voyage as a boy ...
... experience at the center of the poem are themselves confined in a more regular metrical movement suggesting the sen- try's pace or the tick of a clock . The way sound echoes sense is subtler here than in " Gyroscope , ” requiring much ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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