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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... thought that such devices are elements of a grand style , given the lofty air of the example . ( The loftiness is unsurprising ; Arnold was en- deavoring to imitate the style of Homer . ) In fact , as we shall see , these and an ...
... thought of its own , and thought is linked to thought and ca- dence to cadence in unending continuity . " And Saintsbury , who as we have seen was highly conscious of “ the excessively integral character of the line ” in Marlowe ...
... thought of what he might have accomplished during a normal life span prompts feelings of significant loss . He deserves notice not only for the quality of his work but for its unusual stylistic leanings . Keyes was a thoughtful student ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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