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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... opening words can be heard as a much more inter- esting pentameter line with a feminine ending : \ X / x x / x / ( x ) " Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers . " " Fourscore " is either a spondee or a heavy iamb ( for those who are ...
... opening line , these seem to wave us along to the bleak knowledge of life implied by the final word , the percep- tion that there is of all things only one that cannot disappoint . This grim con- viction nestles so comfortably within ...
A Guide to Its History and Use Robert Burns Shaw. four - line sentence opening Catherine Tufariello's " The Feast of Tabernacles " emphasizes the prolonged , even seemingly endless wanderings of the Israelites in the desert . One must ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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