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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... speeches of the sort we have been examining . But , of course , he also made the meter a far more effective medium ... speech supported by recognizable feelings . When Romeo gate- crashes the Capulets ' masked ball , he is detected by ...
... speech , while retaining the ability to elevate itself when a less colloquial tone is fitting . In a play we discover what a character “ sounds like ” not from a single speech but from all of them , and not simply from speeches but from ...
... speech at one end and music at the other , American blank verse was decidedly oriented toward speech — and , it might be added , toward speech that was sparing of histrionic flights . The tone , both in the emotional and the acoustical ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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