Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use

by Robert B. Shaw

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.

With its compact but inclusive survey of more than four centuries of poetry, Blank Verse is filled with practical advice for poets of our own day who may wish to attempt the form or enhance their mastery of it. Enriched with numerous examples, Shaw’s discussions of verse technique are lively and accessible, inviting not only to apprentice poets but to all readers of poetry.

Shaw’s approach should reassure those who find prosody intimidating, while encouraging specialists to think more broadly about how traditional poetic forms can be taught, learned, practiced, and appreciated in the twenty-first century. Besides filling a conspicuous gap in literary history, Blank Verse points the way ahead for poets interested in exploring blank verse and its multitude of uses.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

"More than a few poets over the years must at times have wished there were a Bureau of Prosodic Weights and Measures."

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

First, though I live close to where the author is a professor, I've never met him and I have no stake in the success of this book.

I found this to be a superbly readable overview of the history and use of blank verse, from its inception by Henry Howard in 1540 to its practitioners of the present day. Much of the story of blank verse involves its modification over time: iambic feet substituted with trochees or anapests; lines with shortened or added feet; the use of enjambment. Don't know what any of that means? Don't worry, it's explained. If you do know what that means, don't worry-- the explanations are not ponderous.

What I like about this book is its balance between commentary, theory, and examples. It's not often I completely read a book on poetic technique in a matter of days. I usually lose interest somewhere in the middle. But this book held my interest as it reminded me of many poets I had heard of but hadn't gotten around to checking out, as well as it introduced me to several poets I have never heard of whose examples were intriguing. In the back of the book is a source list for verse references which I found helpful in finding these poets' works on Amazon. In particular, I'm looking forward to receiving books by Turner Cassity, Roy Fuller, Sidney Keyes, and E. J. Pratt.

The author's style was informative without being dryly academic. It was a pleasure to read. If he has any preferences for the kind of blank verse he finds most satisfactory, he doesn't club the reader over the head trying to prove his opinion is right. I suspect he favors trochaic substitutions over anapestic, and truncated lines over lengthened ones, but he expresses himself in such a balanced way that I'm ready to admit I may be wrong in my suspicions.

I think this is a suitable book for either the poetic novice/apprentice or the journeyman poet. Even if one's primary interest is not in blank verse, even if one's preference is not for metered poetry at all, one can gain an insight into the craft by this examination of what is available and what is given up by embracing or dismissing metered poetry.

I definitely recommend this to anyone serious about being a poet. At this time I prefer it over Alfred Corn's "The Poem's Heartbeat" (my previous favorite), Mary Oliver's "Rules for the Dance", Timothy Steele's "all the fun's in how you say a thing", Derek Attridge's "Poetic Rhythm", or William Baer's "Writing Metrical Poetry". Nothing necessarily wrong with those books-- I just found this one more engaging.

[max · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent guide to the most popular metric format in the English language, and thus a good guide to the development of English and American poetry in general.

Covers the introduction of blank verse by Surrey's translation of the Aeneid, Marlowe's adoption of the meter for the theater, Shakespeare's explosive development of its dramatic possibilities, and finally Milton's returning of the meter to the epic in Paradise Lost.

The book then follows Coleridge and Wordsworth's rejection of the couplet trend of their era to strip blank verse of its lofty, Miltonian frame and bring it to bear on their lyric and natural topics.

Later chapters include an excellent survey of Frost's prosody and a contrast of it to Yeats, as well as thorough examinations of contemporary application of blank verse.

Shaw introduces metrical techniques as they are developed historically, such as feminine endings, anapestic substitution, syllable elision, and the like. He also makes sound recommendations to poets today.

Obviously, a book-length study of prosody can occasionally seem myopic, and Shaw has a tendency to read into accentual patterns too much significance, significance that is better understood by other poetic elements of the line. But his obsession over syllable stress is a great way of training one's ear, and reading with Shaw is like watching a piano tuner working his little forks.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

An excellent overview, but it got bogged down as it attempted to frame the discussion of modern poetry and its relationship with blank verse.