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. |
From inside the book
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... longer poems have their moments . There are passages of rarefied beauty in the Arthurian trilogy - particularly in Lancelot — though the overall effect is probably too sedate for current tastes . Avon's Harvest , per- haps because it ...
... longer - lined verse derived from Whitman . If they did decide to give iambic pentameter a try , the stylistic developments of the early twentieth century gave them disparate models . They could pursue experiments with rhythm similar to ...
... longer blank - verse poems . It is not that his sentences are outstandingly long , but that they intimate a capacity to extend themselves to address matters fully . Wilbur keeps the reader alert by varying the length and structural ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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