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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... Prosody makes the case with an exhaustingly punctilious array of ex- amples . George Saintsbury , in his massive History of English Prosody , argued just as forcefully for Milton's use of anapests in such instances . Following their ...
... prosody . " 59 Writing about the late poem " The World as Meditation , " the same critic drifts into metaphor : " Specific phonetic values , the densities of consonant and vowel hardly exist as ' prosody'— though we may hear , something ...
... Prosody , 3 vols . ( London : Macmillan , 1906-10 ) . 12. Robert Bridges , Milton's Prosody , rev . ed . ( Oxford : Oxford University Press , 1921 ) . 13. Edward Weismiller and T. V. F. Brogan , “ Blank Verse , ” in The New Princeton En ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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