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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... discussion of the meter's properties , for the story of blank verse is one of many poets ' technical discoveries and refine- ments over the course of more than four centuries . The impact of any stylistic innovation , we find , is ...
A Guide to Its History and Use Robert Burns Shaw. Any discussion of Yeats's pursuit of the dramatic must take account ... discussing Yeats's speech effects we should look more to oratory and the classic theater for models than to ordinary ...
... discussions of versification . Resisting the notion of " free blank verse " does not relieve us of the need to ponder the various forms of loose blank verse which , as the preceding his- torical discussion has shown , figure ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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