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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... sense . " Examples he offers elsewhere make it clear that what is conveyed by the sound of sense is the full gamut of expressible feeling , much of which earlier poetry has slighted : " You can get enough of those sentence tones that ...
... sense is the first qualification of a writer , be it of prose or verse . But if one is to be a poet he must learn to get cadences by skillfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat ...
... sense of discovery , of delayed but satisfying clarification . Enjambment so used ( and it is often thus that Milton ... sense . It is highly worthwhile to explore not only its aural consequences but its thematically expressive pos ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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