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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... Enjambment enhances motion in poetry , sometimes tracking it directly . Notice how the enjambments increase the ... enjambment can be seen ( if perhaps somewhat too simply ) as a suspense mechanism . It tantalizes us , forces us to look ...
... enjambment . There is plenty of motion in this apparently static scene , but it is the motion of the poet's mind giving thought free play for a time . The value for apprentice poets in mastering enjambment is , as these ex- amples ...
... enjambment of line 31 we would be as strongly impressed by the paradoxical “ gold / Of rust " which the painter celebrates . And the deferment of identification until after the line break of what in fact we are reading about provides a ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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