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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... readers may scan according to differing assumptions , thus obtaining differing results . For instance , some readers would find our scansion of the earlier example , X / X \ x / x x / / The quality of mercy is not strained ...
... readers are aware that it is ( and must be , and should be ) open to question . The scansions offered in the following dis- cussions are carefully considered but necessarily limited attempts to track the behavior of language within ...
... readers will do themselves a favor by seeking out his work . Another traditional stylist who may be mentioned here is John Betjeman . His sort of career has no American equivalent : he parlayed his fascination with Victoriana and ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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