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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... Come , come , you answer with an idle tongue . Hamlet : Go , go , you question with a wicked tongue . ( 3.3.10-13 ) In this case the artifice does not call attention to itself ( we might say , in fact , that the blank verse does not ...
... comes on God's name comes slowly ; but when he's sent On the devil's errand , he rides post and comes in by scuttles . ( 3.2.242-46 ) Symonds , attempting to explain such anomalies , looks to performative pos- sibilities : " Scansion in ...
... comes , forces a revised understanding of what came before . Enjambment thus is properly re- garded as a device not merely of sound but of sense . It is highly worthwhile to explore not only its aural consequences but its thematically ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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