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
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... called in a late poem " high talk . " Someone whose models of discourse were such men as his own father , Oscar Wilde , and his friends in the Rhymers ' Club could hardly be expected to converse in the manner of a New England farmer or ...
... called " Digging for China , " the acerbic epigram called " The Rule " —are graced with Wilbur's gift for finding the right word , which somehow he exercises without fussiness or pedantry . Wilbur's major blank - verse poems are long ...
... called an epic . In its final form this work collects three lengthy poems - The Book of Ephraim , Mirabell , and Scripts for the Pageant— and adds to them a brief coda , " The Higher Keys . " The finished poem is an un- paralleled ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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