Blank verse
Blank verse is a form of poetry characterized by unrhymed iambic pentameter, which consists of lines typically containing ten syllables arranged in five pairs of alternating unstressed and stressed syllables. This meter closely mirrors natural speech, making it a favored choice in drama and dramatic monologues, as well as in epic and lyric poetry. Originating from classical Greek and Latin heroic verse, blank verse was first adopted by Italian poets in the early sixteenth century and later introduced to English poetry by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, around 1540. Its use flourished during the English Renaissance, notably through playwrights like Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, who utilized its flexibility to enrich their dramatic works.
Although blank verse saw a decline in theatrical settings by the late seventeenth century, it experienced a revival with John Milton's "Paradise Lost," which emphasized its narrative potential. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, poets such as William Wordsworth and John Keats further explored and adapted blank verse, showcasing its versatility in both lengthy epics and shorter, more intimate poems. In the modern era, despite the rise of free verse, notable poets like Robert Frost and Adrienne Rich have continued to employ blank verse, demonstrating its enduring relevance and capacity for expressive depth across various themes and styles.
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Blank verse
Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. Because the five-stress, generally decasyllabic line closely reproduces natural speech, it has been particularly popular in drama and dramatic monologues, although the flexibility of the line has often made it the choice of epic and lyric poets as well. Developed in imitation of unrhymed Greek and Latin heroic verse, blank verse was first used by Italian writers in the early sixteenth century. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, introduced the meter into English poetry around 1540, and Renaissance playwrights refined blank verse and made it the predominant meter of drama. John Milton revived the form when he chose to write Paradise Lost in blank verse, and his influence remained powerful. Through the nineteenth century, approximately three-fourths of poetry written in English was in blank verse. Even after modernist poets turned to free verse, poets such as Robert Frost (1874–1963) and Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) wrote some of their most highly praised poems in blank verse, and beyond the modernists, poets such as Nobel laureates Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney demonstrated that blank verse could still be used effectively.
Brief History
Scholars note that the shift from Middle English to the modern English language left English poetry, with its heavy accents, clearly unsuited to the dactylic metrical and the hexameter lines common in classical Greek and Latin poems. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–1547), recognized while translating two books of Vergil’s Aeneid that the iambic pentameter line was flexible enough to allow unrhymed lines in the tradition of classical verse. Surrey’s translation was first published seven years after his death with the words “Translated into English and Drawn into a Strange Meter” appended to the title. “Strange” signified that the meter was foreign or unfamiliar to the English audience, but strangeness was transformed into familiarity as the meter was adopted by dramatists in the sixteenth century.
Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, was the first English play to be written in blank verse, but it was Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), with his “mighty line,” who helped to make blank verse the meter of dramatic verse throughout the English Renaissance. William Shakespeare further refined the use of blank verse, experimenting increasingly with metrical irregularity and enjambment. In some of his characters’ most famous speeches, from the renowned soliloquies of Henry V and Hamlet through Caliban’s complaints and Prospero’s renouncing of his art in The Tempest, Shakespeare used blank verse to elevate while also preserving the sense of authentic, spoken language.
By the time the Stuarts were restored to the throne in 1660, new dramatists preferred heroic couplets to blank verse, and later prose became the language of the stage. But as the use of blank verse declined in plays, Milton (1608–1674) reclaimed it for poetry. Milton’s choice of blank verse for his epic Paradise Lost was considered so surprising that when the second edition was published in 1674, it included a preface in which the poet explained why his poem lacked rhyme. Milton deplored the “barbarity” of rhyme, allied himself with classical poets, and declared Paradise Lost the first poem in English to break free from the bondage of rhyme. Milton’s mastery ensured his position as a figure of influence over generations of poets.
In the century after Milton, blank verse extended beyond narrative purposes. James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730)—four long, reflective landscape poems—enjoyed great popularity and influence in the eighteenth century. Another high-profile writer of blank verse was William Cowper (1731–1800), whose six-book, nearly five-thousand-line poem, The Task (1785), proved to be a significant influence on the romantics.
William Wordsworth (1770–1850), like Milton before him, found blank verse liberating. In poems such as “Michael,” with its preponderance of end-stopped lines, he chose metrical regularity, whereas in “Tintern Abbey” he experimented with variations in meter. The blank verse “conversation poems” of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), including “Frost at Midnight” (1798) and “Dejection: An Ode” (1802), demonstrated that blank verse was not the exclusive province of the epic poet. It could also be used in shorter poems with an informal, intimate tone.
Romantic poets continued to explore blank verse. Lord Byron (1788–1824) used blank verse in two verse dramas, Manfred (1817) and Cain (1821). Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) chose the unrhymed meter for Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1816), one of his first major poems, and for the historical tragedy The Cenci (1819). John Keats (1795–1821) demonstrates his mastery of the meter in his unfinished epic Hyperion (1818–1819). Robert Browning (1812–1889) and Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), major Victorian poets, employed blank verse in a new poetic genre, the dramatic monologue. Both poets also chose blank verse for longer works: Browning’s “verse novel,” The Ring and the Book (1868–1869), and Tennyson’s narrative cycle, Idylls of the King (1859–1885).
Topic Today
Though it declined in popularity with the advent of modernism, blank verse has continued to be used throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Frost became famous for the use of blank verse in dramatic monologues and dramatic dialogues. Some of Frost’s best-known poems, including “Mending Wall,” showcase the skill with which Frost combined metrical regularity and metrical variation to create speech that was both ordinary and poetic.
Many of the poems of Stevens are also in blank verse, including “Sunday Morning” (1915). Critics have noted that Stevens sometimes blurs the line between blank verse and free verse, and even in his early use of blank verse, Stevens incorporates some startling irregularities. For example, a line from “The Comedian as the Letter C” (“This auditor of insects! He that saw”) uses an exclamation as a caesura with stresses on either side.
Later poets who used blank verse include mid-twentieth-century formalists such as Randall Jarrell, Richard Wilbur, and Anthony Hecht. Of particular interest is Adrienne Rich and her revision of “Living in Sin.” Written in free verse in the original version (1955), the version that appeared in Collected Early Poems: 1950–1970 (1993) is in blank verse. Rich’s choice of the meter associated with literary patriarchs such as Shakespeare and Milton allowed her to use form to emphasize that gender roles remained unchanged even as sexual mores underwent revolution. In the 1980s, New Narrative movement emerged, and young poets interested in incorporating conversational tone and direct dialogue into their poetry, including Andrew Hudgins, Mark Jarman, and Marilyn Nelson, began writing in blank verse.
Bibliography
Carper, Thomas, and Derek Attridge. Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.
Gioia, Dana. “Robert Frost and the Modern Narrative Poem.” Robert Frost in Context. Ed. Mark Richardson. New York: Cambridge UP, 2014. 72–84. Print.
Hecht, Anthony. “Blank Verse.” An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art. Ed. Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002. 46–51. Print.
Hirsch, Edward. A Poet’s Glossary. New York: Houghton, 2014. Print.
Kendall, Tim. The Art of Robert Frost. New Haven: Yale UP, 2012. 45–176. Print.
Shaw, Robert Burns. Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use. Athens: Ohio UP, 2007. Print.
Vendler, Helen. “The Medium of Instruction: Doctrine in Blank Verse.” Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form. Cambridge: Belknap, 2007. 245–261. Print.
Weinfield, Henry. The Blank-Verse Tradition from Milton to Stevens: Freethinking and the Crisis of Modernity. New York: Cambridge UP, 2012. Print.
Womack, Mark. “Shakespearean Prosody Unbound.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 45.1 (2003): 1–19. Print.