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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... sometimes went further with them than would please the exact prosodist . An- other result , ironically , was that less - than - studious readers were sometimes under the impression that Frost was writing free verse , which he abhorred ...
... sometimes of humble folk , but he was more bookish , and his work ranges be- yond the proletariat in many longer pieces . He wrote in more complex ( though not necessarily more effective ) forms . Sometimes he undertook to combine ...
... Sometimes he uses rhyme , sometimes free verse . The works contain many blank - verse passages , but they are more likely than the earlier poetry to employ sporadic Eliotic effects . In his more traditional vein , Aiken's iambic ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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