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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... sentence of Abraham Lincoln's Gettys- burg Address reads , " Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth ... sentence from which they have been lifted , however , and their verselike quality becomes less salient . They ...
... sentence which , like some of Milton's , unfolds overlapping layers of simile and allusion . Blank verse ... sentence for a special purpose . The first sentence of Edwin Muir's " The Labyrinth , " mentioned earlier , sprawls across ...
... sentence is immediately followed by one contrastingly short , which intensifies the imagery in a different way , through ironic incongruity . We have no sooner arrived at the terminus of the long sentence's death reference than we ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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