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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... reading will depend on the construction of the individual line and , even more , perhaps , on the construction of ... readers do not always " hear " a line of verse - especially a problematic one - in the same way . To return to our ...
... reading the first foot as iambic and by reading “ gray day " as a feminine ending ( but an unusu- ally heavy one ) : X / x \ X / X / X / ( x ) Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day Even readers who know the poem well may find ...
... reading the poem aloud would be obliged to choose one of these options ( or another more eccentric ) ; but in reading the poem to our- selves it is likely that we will hear what Frost wants us to hear , the patterns of speech rhythms ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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