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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... plays , Abercrombie mulls over the distinction between plays in verse and what he calls “ dramatic poems . " Much as the nineteenth century did , he sees the difference stemming from whether the work is meant to be performed or not ...
... plays , like most of Bottomley's , are a good deal shorter than any Shake- speare play . Other plays by Bottomley , like some of Yeats's later plays , are no more than a few pages — a feature which among many others suggests a prac ...
... plays by Robert Lowell , The Old Glory , adapts stories by Hawthorne and Melville into one - act plays , all in free verse . Blank verse has been distinctly underemployed in the theater in recent decades . Discussing plays written after ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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