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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... poetry as a grand performance for which they were the audience suddenly met with poetry which , it seemed , they were just happening to overhear . This brings the discussion of these poets back to where it began , with poetry as ...
... poetry to the broader culture during the period . For certain poets the formalist style they began with came to seem ill - suited for addressing ur- gent political or social concerns , or for projecting an authentic sense of self . The ...
... Poetry : From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode , 369 . 29. Maxwell Anderson , “ Poetry in the Theater , " in Off Broadway ( New York : William Sloane , 1947 ) , 47 . 30. Ibid . , 50 . 31. Prior , Language of Tragedy , 319 . 32 ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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