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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 33
... tones that suggest grandeur and sweetness everywhere in po- etry . What bothers people in my blank verse is that I have tried to see what I could do with boasting tones and quizzical tones and shrugging tones ( for there are such ) and ...
... tone of voice somehow en- tangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination . That is all that can save poetry from sing - song , all that can save prose from itself . ” 18 The implied defense for rhythmic ...
... tone . He uses regularity for another purpose in " World - Telegram , " which summarizes , for the most part without comment , the contents of a daily newspaper : Right of the centre , and three columns wide , A rather blurred but ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
2 other sections not shown