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 51
... English meter at the beginning of the sixteenth century was in grave disarray . After the death of Geoffrey Chaucer in 1400 , the language itself had undergone the shifts in grammar and pronunciation that made it Modern English ...
... English , of which he com- pleted versions of book 2 ( the fall of Troy ) and book 4 ( the betrayal and death of ... English and Drawn into a Strange Meter by Henry late Earl of Surrey . The " strange meter " of Surrey's translation was ...
... English stress , or eight . How can one be sure ? What one can always be sure of is that a given syllable in a sequence is more or less stressed than the preceding or the following . Or , suppose that there are , as Jespersen and Trager ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
2 other sections not shown