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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... ( Notice how the spondee of " plumb down " acts like a lead weight suddenly added , as the action goes from fluttering to plummeting . ) After being buffeted back up by the tumultuous updraft , Satan manages to find a dubious sort of ...
... notice some differences between their military poems and those of World War I. There are not as many direct treatments of combat ; battle is often alluded to , or anticipated , or recalled rather than simply being depicted in progress ...
... notice the pun on " temple " and wonder if Browning was in fact as devoted to wordplay as Howard is . Such questions hardly matter when , as in this piece , the poet creates an altogether persuasive mise - en - scène for his equally ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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