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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... breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre . Verse in ... break the intonation across the metre as waves first comb and then break stumbling on the shingle . That's all , but ...
... breaking to bits , Showering motionless stars over the houses . Scenes relentless - the black and white grooves of a woodcut . ( 15-19 ) Statistically , the majority of lines in the poem are given to breaking into this sort of anapestic ...
... breaking the pentameter , as Pound would urge , or fol- lowing its pattern in a lockstep fashion , as in Masefield's padded lines , there is a third alternative . That is to explore the elasticity coiled within the line , to discover ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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