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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... short poems we now take for granted were pio- neered by these poets , and for many of them blank verse was the chosen medium . In many of these , as in Wordsworth's book - length The Prelude , the autobiographical content and the ...
... short . The speaker has been musing on the contrast between the mysterious " feline race " of women and “ mouse - quiet " men such as himself . He concludes : The worst is when they hide from us and change X / X / X / X / X To something ...
... Short End " and " See Naples and Die , ” re- quired , besides poetic talent , the skills of a short story writer ; even lengthier , " The Venetian Vespers " has the feel of a short novel in verse . These , briefer monologues like " The ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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