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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... look no further than Ben Jonson , who typically maintains the metrical pattern with few dis- crepancies . This cooler , seemingly more classical approach results , in Jonson's best blank verse , in lines that are taut without being ...
... look , as it were , by arranging it in stanzas . This practice , together with Francis's customary brevity , runs counter to traditional expectations of blank verse , which readers tend to associate with amplitude and with divisions ...
... look back before we go for- ward . The poet's calculated use of this kind of enjambment can be similar in its process and outcome to propounding a riddle : the audience is encouraged to look in the wrong direction for the answer , which ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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