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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... stress on the word : X / X / X \ X 1 x / The caterpillars of the commonwealth In assessing relative levels of stress in a line , readers may scan according to differing assumptions , thus obtaining differing results . For instance ...
... stress mark : X / x \ x / x \ \ The quality of mercy is not strained But this seems awkward , and a reader asked to recite the line according to both scansions in succession is likely to find little to distinguish one from the other ...
... stress . ) Either reversing the accent's position or attempting to be more accurate by giving both syllables equal stress would still leave the middle of the line disrupted . 54. This is not an easy line to scan persuasively . We may ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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