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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... wrote blank - verse poems of lyric or epigrammatic brevity . Such pieces as " In the Seven Woods " and " A Prayer on Going into My House " publish the poet's alienated ( and sometimes alienating ) moods with lapidary precision . The ...
... wrote numerous verse dramas of a highly conventional sort , favoring exotic settings or historical themes that entailed much theatrical spectacle . Jeanne d'Arc and A Thousand Years Ago ( a version of the Turandot story ) are examples ...
... wrote in free verse or in syllab- ics for the most part . At the other end of the stylistic spectrum , traditionalists like Elinor Wylie and Edna St. Vincent Millay were devoted to rhyme and showed little interest in prosodic ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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