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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... move ; if he say true , hee lies . This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained Grew so broad - minded he was scatter - brained . ( " Epigrams : A Journal " [ 30 ] ) If , as an experiment , we substitute for the first rhyme - word in each ...
... move slowly , plodding along as in the first line of monosyllables , and they move just as slowly through the polysyllabic entanglements of the tempted mind , which itself seems “ tram- meled " in knotty phrasing like “ and catch ...
... move- ment as it was less prettified in diction . In Calvary ( 1920 ) , Lazarus accosts Christ on his way to be ... moved beyond a predisposition to blank verse in the course of his career as a dramatist , many later poets never harbored ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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