Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and UseOhio University Press, 2007 - 305 pages Blank 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. |
From inside the book
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... written them are undoubtedly more distinctive in dic- tion . But they are also prosodically " off , ” and this is as ... writing like an apparition or nightmare . Second , meter ( or , at least , the " simple " meter Eliot has in mind ) ...
... written and the blank verse that was not written . The latter point is , of course , not capable of proof , but common sense suggests that younger poets in these years would have been more frequently drawn to the form were it not for ...
... written " Such tink and tank and tunk - a- tunk - a - tunk , " satisfying the meter as well as his yen for xylophone ... writing . ( Stevens himself touches on this idea , writing to Morton Zabel in 1933 : “ I do not much like the new ...
Contents
Before the Twentieth Century 333 | 82 |
After Modernism | 161 |
Writing Blank Verse Today | 244 |
Copyright | |
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