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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... offers supreme flexi- bility to poets attempting to fashion such voices . Of the two great monologuists , Browning is the more naturalistic . " Fra Lippo Lippi " presents the painter - monk on his ramblings , chatting up the night watch ...
... offers as a comforting reflection the idea that the earth is a gigantic tomb . It may be that a more flamboyant ... offer the same modest enjoyment . Some of Wordsworth's strength has gone out of the style ; its attractive mildness ...
... is unrhymed iambic pentameter ) , but is not re- ally iambic pentameter ( thanks to " significant loosening ” ) . If Kinzie , whose compendious book offers much useful information in other respects , Writing Blank Verse Today 245.
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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