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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... narrative interest . It is almost beside the point to note that the verse in them is undistinguished , because they would not be effective fictions if written in prose . David Perkins casts Robinson as a leading example in discussing ...
... narrative poet ; but for Frost in all but a few poems it is the essential background and , often enough , foreground . The major exceptions to New England narratives ( or shorter New England descriptive pieces ) in Frost's blank verse ...
... narrative , the other epistolary , are left out of her definitive selection of her poems.50 Both poems are certainly problematic , but they are well worth reading . Bogan had a subtler command of rhythm than other poets more widely ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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