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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... later work he was frequently willing to vary rhythms strikingly within a play by shifting from blank verse to prose , or to verse , sometimes rhymed , in other meters . The blank verse , when still used , was more urgent in move- ment ...
... later poems in the meter as well : the sinister travelogue " Côte des Maures , " the eerily futuristic “ Pleasure Drive , ” the autobiographical “ Youth Revisited . " " Expostulation and Inadequate Reply " is an unusually elegant ...
... later piece for an inanimate speaker , “ Einstein's Bathrobe , " which moves from homely details about the physicist at the break- fast table to a cosmic grandeur : From signs Phoenicians scratched into the sand With sticks he drew the ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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