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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... anapest , which became a more widely accepted substitution in Arnold's century , is a trisyllabic foot ( × × / ) and hence lengthens the iambic pentameter line to eleven syllables . Arnold adds a ripple to the verse by following an iamb ...
... anapest for an iamb — that some scholars view as an innovation dating to later times in nondramatic verse . In the early part of the twentieth century , Robert Bridges argued forcefully for the presence in Milton of the kinds of elision ...
... anapest ― for three of its iambs , which might seem to give special emphasis to the close of the horrific catalogue . And yet the final line , with only one substitution - a terminal anapest - is climactic in a more sur- prising way ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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