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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... practice is usually stricter than that of the dramatists . We have still to consider what Milton meant in referring to “ the sense variously drawn out from one Verse to another . " More than any other poet , Milton makes us aware of the ...
... practice veered , emotionally and thematically , between extremes - one dark and acidic , the other sunny and maple - sugary . This was inaccurate and un- helpful , since the shadings of human experience in Frost's narrative and dra ...
... practice a name : " parasitic meter . " He elaborates : The term is descriptive and pejorative . Such meter presupposes a meter by law which it uses , alludes to , traduces , returns to . To perceive it one must have firmly in mind the ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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