Blank verse

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Blank verse is a type of verse, distinguished by a regular meter, but no rhyme. In English language poetry the meter used is usually iambic pentameter.

Blank verse has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the sixteenth century." All of the major plays of the Elizabethan period, and many of the great epic poems of the English canon, are in blank verse.

In addition to being a powerfully dramatic form, blank verse has also proved to be one of the most durable and versatile of all verse-forms both in English and other languages. As rhyme faded in popularity towards the beginning of the 20th century, blank verse became more and more common in both short and long poems. It has remained in use even through the most experimental periods of literary modernism, and it remains a popular form among poets to this day. Scholar Paul Fussell has claimed that "about three-quarters of all English poetry is in blank verse."

History

The first documented use of blank verse in the English language was by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey in his translation of the Aeneid (c. 1554). He was possibly inspired by the Latin original, as classical Latin verse (as well as Greek verse) did not use rhyme. He may have been inspired by the Italian verse form of Versi Sciolti , which also contained no rhyme. Gorboduc (1561), the first blank-verse tragedy, illustrates how monotonous such verse could be. http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/gorboduc.html] The play, Arden of Faversham (circa 1590 by an unknown author) is a notable example of end-stopped blank verse. Marlowe and then Shakespeare developed its potential greatly in the late 16th century. Christopher Marlowe was the first English author to make full use of its potential, and also established it as the dominant verse form for English drama in the age of Elizabeth I and James I. 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 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.

(Doctor Faustus)

Blank verse is most associated with William Shakespeare, who wrote much of the content of his plays in unrhymed iambic pentameter. 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:

My lord?

A grave.

He shall not live.

Enough.

(King John, 3.3)

Shakespeare 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 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;...

(The Tempest, 5.1)

This loose treatment of blank verse was imitated by Shakespeare's contemporaries, and led to general metrical slackeness in the hands of less skilled users. However, Shakespearean blank verse was used with some success by John Webster and Thomas Middleton. Ben Jonson, meanwhile, used a tighter blank verse with less enjambment in his great comedies Volpone and The Alchemist.

Further achievements in English blank verse were made by Milton, whose Paradise Lost used unrhymed iambic pentameter with much license and tremendous skill. 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:

(Paradise Lost, Book 1)

Milton also wrote Paradise Regained and parts of Samson Agonistes in blank verse. Milton's blank verse was widely imitated in the next century; however, 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 eighteenth 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 Poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Wordsworth used blank verse 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. Coleridge's blank verse is more technical than Wordsworth's, but he wrote little of it; his so-called "conversation Poems" such as "The Aeolian 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 beauties 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 frequently throughout the 20th century both in original poetry and in translations of narrative verse. Among American poets, Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens are notable for using blank verse in extended compositions at a time when many other poets were turning to free verse. Most of Robert Frost's narrative and conversational poems are in blank verse; so are other major 20th century poems like W.B. Yeats's "The Second Coming", W.H. Auden's "The Watershed" and John Betjeman's Summoned by Bells. In Canada, E.J. Pratt used blank verse to construct a series of major national epics. MacKinlay Kantor's 1945 novella of the struggles of returning World War II veterans, Glory for Me, which was the basis for the movie The Best Years of Our Lives, was written in blank verse. In 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 that blank verse is as prominent now as it has been any time in the past three hundred years.

Examples

Poems written in blank verse include:

• Darkness / Lord Byron
• Tears, Idle Tears / Tennyson
• Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow / Shakespeare

See also

• Free verse
• Iambic pentameter
• List of poetic forms
• Verse (poetry)

References

• The Department of English. "Blank Verse" in The UVic Writer's Guide. University of Victoria, 1995. http://web.uvic.ca/wguide/Pages/LTBlankVerse.html
• Deutsch, Babette, Poetry Handbook, fourth edition. 1974.
• Milton, John, Paradise Lost. Merritt Hughes, ed. New York, 1985.