Tweet
Blank verse consist of lines of iambic pentameter (five-stress iambic verse) which are unrhymed -- hence the term "blank." Of all English metrical forms it is closest to the natural rhythms of English speech, yet flexible an adaptive to diverse levels of discourse; as a result it has been more frequently and variously used than any other type of versification. Soon after blank verse was introduced by the Earl of Surrey in translation of Book 2 and 4 of Virgil's The Aeneid (about 1540), it become the standard meter for Elizabethan and later poetic drama; a free form of blank verse reminded the medium in such twentieth-century verse plays as those by Maxwell Anderson and T.S. Eliot. John Milton used blank verse for his epic Paradise Lost (1667), James Thomson for his descriptive and philosophical Seasons (1726-30), William Wordsworth for his autobiographical Prelude (1805), Alfred, Lord Tennyson for narrative Idylls of the King (1891) , Robert Browning for The Ring and The Book (1868-9) and many dramatic monologues, and T.S. Eliot for much of The Wast Land (1922). A large number of meditative lyrics, form the Romantic Period to the present, have also been written in blank verse, including Coleridge's "Frost at midnight," Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey," Tennyson's "Tears, Idle Tears' (in which the blank verse is divided into five-line stanzas), and Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning."
Division in blank verse poems, used to set off a sustained passage, are called verse paragraphs. See, for example, the great verse paragraph of twenty-six lines which initiate Milton's Paradise Lost, beginning with "Of men's first disobedience" and ending with "And justify the ways of God to men"; also, the opening verse paragraph of twenty--two lines in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (1798), which begins:
Division in blank verse poems, used to set off a sustained passage, are called verse paragraphs. See, for example, the great verse paragraph of twenty-six lines which initiate Milton's Paradise Lost, beginning with "Of men's first disobedience" and ending with "And justify the ways of God to men"; also, the opening verse paragraph of twenty--two lines in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (1798), which begins:
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.
Source: A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.
Source: A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams