The first known use of blank verse in English was by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey in his translation of the Aeneid (composed c.1540; published posthumously, 1554–1557[3]). He may have been inspired by the Latin original since classical Latin verse did not use rhyme, or possibly he was inspired by Ancient Greek verse or the Italian verse form of versi sciolti, both of which also did not use rhyme.
Marlowe and then Shakespeare developed its potential greatly in the late 16th century. Marlowe was the first to exploit the potential of blank verse for powerful and involved speech:
You stars that reign'd at my nativity, Whose influence hath allotted death and hell, Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist Into the entrails of yon labouring clouds, That when they vomit forth into the air, My limbs may issue from their smoky mouths, So that my soul may but ascend to Heaven.
Shakespeare developed this feature, and also the potential of blank verse for abrupt and irregular speech. For example, in this exchange from King John, one blank verse line is broken between two characters:
Shakespeare also used enjambment increasingly often in his verse, and in his last plays was given to using feminine endings (in which the last syllable of the line is unstressed, for instance lines 3 and 6 of the following example); all of this made his later blank verse extremely rich and varied.
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves, And ye that on the sands with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him When he comes back; you demi-puppets that By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid, Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimmed The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault Set roaring war – to the dread rattling thunder Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak With his own bolt;...
This very free treatment of blank verse was imitated by Shakespeare's contemporaries, and led to general metrical looseness in the hands of less skilled users. However, Shakespearean blank verse was used with some success by John Webster and Thomas Middleton in their plays. Ben Jonson, meanwhile, used a tighter blank verse with less enjambment in his comedies Volpone and The Alchemist.
Blank verse was not much used in the non-dramatic poetry of the 17th century until Paradise Lost, in which Milton used it with much license. Milton used the flexibility of blank verse, its capacity to support syntactic complexity, to the utmost, in passages such as these:
....Into what Pit thou seest From what highth fal'n, so much the stronger provd He with his Thunder: and till then who knew The force of those dire Arms? yet not for those Nor what the Potent Victor in his rage Can else inflict do I repent or change, Though chang'd in outward lustre; that fixt mind And high disdain, from sence of injur'd merit, That with the mightiest rais'd me to contend, And to the fierce contention brought along Innumerable force of Spirits arm'd That durst dislike his reign, and me preferring, His utmost power with adverse power oppos'd In dubious Battel on the Plains of Heav'n, And shook his throne. What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable Will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield:
Milton also wrote Paradise Regained and parts of Samson Agonistes in blank verse. In the century after Milton, there are few distinguished uses of either dramatic or non-dramatic blank verse; in keeping with the desire for regularity, most of the blank verse of this period is somewhat stiff. The best examples of blank verse from this time are probably John Dryden's tragedy All for Love and James Thomson's The Seasons. An example notable as much for its failure with the public as for its subsequent influence on the form is John Dyer's The Fleece.
At the close of the 18th century, William Cowper ushered in a renewal of blank verse with his volume of kaleidoscopic meditations, The Task, published in 1784. After Shakespeare and Milton, Cowper was the main influence on the next major poets in blank verse, teenagers when Cowper published his masterpiece. These were the Lake PoetsWilliam Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth used the form for many of the Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800), and for his longest efforts, The Prelude and The Excursion. Wordsworth's verse recovers some of the freedom of Milton's, but is generally far more regular:
Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! And again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur. – Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs...
Coleridge's blank verse is more technical than Wordsworth's, but he wrote little of it:
Well, they are gone, and here must I remain, This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost Beauties and feelings, such as would have been Most sweet to my remembrance even when age had dimmed mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile...
His conversation poems such as "The Eolian Harp" and "Frost at Midnight" are the best known of his blank verse works. The blank verse of Keats in Hyperion is mainly modelled on that of Milton, but takes fewer liberties with the pentameter and possesses the characteristic of Keats's verse. Shelley's blank verse in The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound is closer to Elizabethan practice than to Milton's.
Of the Victorian writers in blank verse, the most prominent are Tennyson and Robert Browning. Tennyson's blank verse in poems like "Ulysses" and "The Princess" is musical and regular; his lyric "Tears, Idle Tears" is probably the first important example of the blank verse stanzaic poem. Browning's blank verse, in poems like "Fra Lippo Lippi", is more abrupt and conversational. Gilbert and Sullivan's 1884 opera, Princess Ida, is based on Tennyson's "The Princess". Gilbert's dialogue is in blank verse throughout (although the other 13 Savoy operas have prose dialogue). Below is an extract spoken by Princess Ida after singing her entrance aria "Oh, goddess wise".
Women of Adamant, fair neophytes— Who thirst for such instruction as we give, Attend, while I unfold a parable. The elephant is mightier than Man, Yet Man subdues him. Why? The elephant Is elephantine everywhere but here (tapping her forehead) And Man, whose brain is to the elephant's As Woman's brain to Man's—(that's rule of three),— Conquers the foolish giant of the woods, As Woman, in her turn, shall conquer Man. In Mathematics, Woman leads the way: The narrow-minded pedant still believes That two and two make four! Why, we can prove, We women—household drudges as we are— That two and two make five—or three—or seven; Or five-and-twenty, if the case demands!
Blank verse, of varying degrees of regularity, has been used quite frequently throughout the 20th century in original verse and in translations of narrative verse. Most of Robert Frost's narrative and conversational poems are in blank verse; so are other poems like Wallace Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West" and "The Comedian as the Letter C", W. B. Yeats's "The Second Coming", W. H. Auden's "The Watershed" and John Betjeman's Summoned by Bells. A complete listing is impossible, since a sort of loose blank verse has become a staple of lyric poetry, but it would be safe to say[weaselwords] that blank verse is as prominent now as it has been any time in the past three hundred years.
Ja, Daja; Gott sei Dank! Doch warum endlich? Hab ich denn eher wiederkommen wollen? Und wiederkommen können? Babylon Ist von Jerusalem, wie ich den Weg, Seitab bald rechts, bald links, zu nehmen bin Genötigt worden, gut zweihundert Meilen; Und Schulden einkassieren, ist gewiss Auch kein Geschäft, das merklich fördert, das So von der Hand sich schlagen lässt.
In poetry, enjambment is incomplete syntax at the end of a line; the meaning 'runs over' or 'steps over' from one poetic line to the next, without punctuation. Lines without enjambment are end-stopped. The origin of the word is credited to the French word enjamber, which means 'to straddle or encroach'.
A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used in epic and narrative poetry, and consisting of a rhyming pair of lines in iambic pentameter. Use of the heroic couplet was pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales, and generally considered to have been perfected by John Dryden and Alexander Pope in the Restoration Age and early 18th century respectively.
In poetry, a hendecasyllable is a line of eleven syllables. The term may refer to several different poetic meters, the older of which are quantitative and used chiefly in classical poetry, and the newer of which are syllabic or accentual-syllabic and used in medieval and modern poetry.
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, and civil servant. His 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost, written in blank verse and including twelve books, was written in a time of immense religious flux and political upheaval. It addressed the fall of man, including the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and God's expulsion of them from the Garden of Eden. Paradise Lost elevated Milton's reputation as one of history's greatest poets. He also served as a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under its Council of State and later under Oliver Cromwell.
In poetry, metre or meter is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study and the actual use of metres and forms of versification are both known as prosody.
The term sonnet derives from the Italian word sonetto. It refers to a fixed verse poetic form, traditionally consisting of fourteen lines adhering to a set rhyming scheme. Originating in 13th-century Sicily, the sonnet was in time taken up in many European-language areas, mainly to express romantic love at first, although eventually any subject was considered acceptable. Many formal variations were also introduced, including abandonment of the quatorzain limit – and even of rhyme altogether in modern times.
The Spenserian stanza is a fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590–96). Each stanza contains nine lines in total: eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a single 'alexandrine' line in iambic hexameter. The rhyme scheme of these lines is ABABBCBCC.
Rhyme royal is a rhyming stanza form that was introduced to English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer. The form enjoyed significant success in the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth century. It has had a more subdued but continuing influence on English verse in more recent centuries.
"Ulysses" is a poem in blank verse by the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), written in 1833 and published in 1842 in his well-received second volume of poetry. An oft-quoted poem, it is a popular example of the dramatic monologue. Facing old age, mythical hero Ulysses describes his discontent and restlessness upon returning to his kingdom, Ithaca, after his far-ranging travels. Despite his reunion with his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus, Ulysses yearns to explore again.
The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet's Mind; An Autobiographical Poem is an autobiographical poem in blank verse by the English poet William Wordsworth. Intended as the introduction to the more philosophical poem The Recluse, which Wordsworth never finished, The Prelude is an extremely personal work and reveals many details of Wordsworth's life.
Iambic pentameter is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in each line. Rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called "feet". "Iambic" indicates that the type of foot used is the iamb, which in English is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. "Pentameter" indicates that each line has five "feet".
Milton's Prosody, with a chapter on Accentual Verse and Notes is a book by Robert Bridges. It was first published by Oxford University Press in 1889, and a final revised edition was published in 1921.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and introduction to poetry:
The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry is a 1947 collection of essays by Cleanth Brooks. It is considered a seminal text in the New Critical school of literary criticism. The title contains an allusion to the fourth stanza of John Donne's poem, "The Canonization", which is the primary subject of the first chapter of the book.
The reception history of John Milton and his works has been a mixture of positive and negative responses, with his greatest influence being found within his poetry.
The poetic style of John Milton, also known as Miltonic verse, Miltonic epic, or Miltonic blank verse, was a highly influential poetic structure popularized by Milton. Although Milton wrote earlier poetry, his influence is largely grounded in his later poems: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.
A line is a unit of writing into which a poem or play is divided: literally, a single row of text. The use of a line operates on principles which are distinct from and not necessarily coincident with grammatical structures, such as the sentence or single clauses in sentences. Although the word for a single poetic line is verse, that term now tends to be used to signify poetic form more generally. A line break is the termination of the line of a poem and the beginning of a new line.
An Eton Poetry Book is an anthology edited by Cyril Alington and George Lyttelton, with an introduction by A. C. Benson. The editors' intentions were "to provide poems which boys might reasonably be expected to like" and "to awaken their metrical sense." The book was published in 1925, with a second impression in 1927 and a third in 1938.
The Task: A Poem, in Six Books is a poem in blank verse by William Cowper published in 1785, usually seen as his supreme achievement. Its six books are called "The Sofa", "The Timepiece", "The Garden", "The Winter Evening", "The Winter Morning Walk" and "The Winter Walk at Noon". Beginning with a mock-Miltonic passage on the origins of the sofa, it develops into a discursive meditation on the blessings of nature, the retired life and religious faith, with attacks on slavery, blood sports, fashionable frivolity, lukewarm clergy and French despotism among other things.
Poetic devices are a form of literary device used in poetry. Poems are created out of poetic devices via a composite of: structural, grammatical, rhythmic, metrical, verbal, and visual elements. They are essential tools that a poet uses to create rhythm, enhance a poem's meaning, or intensify a mood or feeling.
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