Blank verse : a guide to its history and use / Robert B. Shaw.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shaw, Robert B. (Robert Burns), 1947-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Blank verse, English--History and criticism.

Blank verse, English.

Physical Description:

xi, 305 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Athens : Ohio University Press, [2007]

Summary:

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.

Contents:

A Note on References and Symbols xi

Chapter 1 The Sounds of Blank Verse 1

Chapter 2 Before the Twentieth Century 33

Chapter 3 Blank Verse and Modernism 82

Chapter 4 After Modernism 161

Chapter 5 Writing Blank Verse Today 244

Source List for Verse References 283.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 283-289) and index.

ISBN:

9780821417577

0821417576

9780821417584

0821417584

OCLC:

74964318

Online:

Contributor biographical information

Publisher description