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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... style of these examples represents only one of a spec- trum of styles in which the meter has been successfully employed . Once again , let us leave scansion aside for the moment and sample some of this stylistic range in passages of ...
... style was the first phase of modernism in poetry ; it was a discipline Yeats had begun to impose on himself by the time he met Frost , and his style grew more angular still as he advanced into middle age . These two poets should have ...
... style they will hunt for something they can assure themselves is free of stale , inherited ges- tures . Iambic pentameter , of course , was not to blame for the clichéd verbal style of many poet - playwrights ; but there is no doubt ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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