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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... thing about this metaphor is the appar- ent equality of its two terms : neither rhythm ( the donkey ) nor meter ( the cart ) is mightier , and Frost imagines their maintaining a condition of constant tension , alternating dominance ...
... thing / That hates our lives [ ... ] ” ( 1.1–3 ) . A few lines more , and she is in- terrupted by a man : " Now hold your crying tongue , daft - witted thing ; / We're thrang enough without you clamorous " ( 1.7-8 ) . It is hard to ...
... Thing : An Explanation of Meter and Versification ( Athens : Ohio University Press , 1999 ) . See especially chapter 1 , “ Metrical Norm and Rhythmical Modulation , ” 27–51 . 7. For skepticism as to spondees , see Steele , All the Fun's ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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