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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... less - nothing ! -and that ended it . No more to build on there . And they , since they Were not the one dead , turned to their affairs . ( 31-34 ) This kind of extremely pared - down narrative - running less than a page- has proven one ...
... less ornate , it rarely approaches the level of colloquialism that is the norm in Frost . It creates an effect of conversation when Yeats so intends , but it is typically what he called in a late poem " high talk . " Someone whose ...
... less than punctilious about including a syllable more or less . The following is unusual , for Walcott , in maintaining iambic movement to the de- that it does , and unusual also in forgoing rhyme . Here the poet , watching a religious ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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