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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... pause and reevaluate what he has read . Since the mechanism depends on the suppression ( or at least the diminishment ) of the pause at the line's end , the paradoxical nature of this device is intriguingly evident . It is often enough ...
... pause . Frost is a busy punctuator in the passage above , and his use of dashes would seem to specify major pauses , as do his periods within or at the ends of lines . Commas are more questionable . The pause in the final line , after ...
... pause between the two syllables of a final iamb . But the enjambment of " thinks " with the following phrase keeps that pause from being as pronounced as the one before " now " -a word not only end - stopped but literally the end of the ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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