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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... end - stopped , and the additional stress we place on the word is not one that encourages a pause : we are carried ... end of a line — the " feminine ending " that we discussed briefly in chapter 1. The first four lines of Hamlet's best ...
... end - stops line 13 intimates the " imperceptible , " unhaltable progress of decay . Not truly unhaltable , though ; the final line of the stanza , also end - stopped , reminds us of the ultimate end , and it brings this se- quence of ...
... end - stopping play against the surrounding en- jambments : " Hope ” is encapsulated by pauses as the pilot is ... stopped but literally the end of the poem . In fact , if we go back to the be- ginning of the grammatical clause in line ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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