Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use
Language: English
Pages: 312
ISBN: 0821417584
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
In The Tempest, which may be his last, we find it in the opening lines of a famous speech of Prospero’s: Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air [. . .] (4.1.148–50) Shaw ch2:Layout 1 42 1/19/07 5:28 PM Page 42 Blank Verse The enjambment here in the second line is especially conspicuous since the more typically unstressed conjunction “and” has been moved into a stressed position. In reading it we put more stress.
Are worth anything. We depend for variety on the infinite play of accents in the sound of sense. The high possibility of emotional expression all lies in this mingling of sense-sound and word-accent.11 My versification seems to bother people more than I should have expected— I suppose because I have been so long accustomed to thinking of it in my own private way. It is as simple as this: there are the very regular preestablished accent and measure of blank verse; and there are the very irregular.
Pursuit of a “contrast of fixity and flux.” We can find blank-verse lines in Four Quartets, but they tend to be isolated amid longer passages of lines that do not hew to the pattern. In part 5 of “The Dry Salvages” Eliot describes “an occupation for the saint” as being “to apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / With time,” and elaborates: x / x / x / x x / x / (x) No occupation either, but something given And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love, Ardour and selflessness.
1/19/07 5:42 PM Page 130 Blank Verse baleful struggle between old and new but a complex give-and-take in which both are transformed as they are united. If one applied this more general conceptual scheme to the issue of verse form, one might answer Cunningham’s critique by saying that Eliot’s poems relate to earlier verse not through parasitism but through a form of symbiosis. Perhaps, rather than either “symbiotic” or “parasitic,” a nonfigurative adjective such as “intermittent” would be.
The work, but here and there Schwartz’s querulous ghosts strike a nerve in their ruminations: What have we now But this eternal knowledge and regret, Not an oblivion . . . at best, a sweet drugged sleep When we are lucky! the sleep of hospitals— True, one gets used to pain as one gets used To living near a waterfall or trains, But I cannot believe I will become Shaw ch4:Layout 1 168 1/19/07 5:44 PM Page 168 Blank Verse Used to regret, return, the infinite Apocalypse of all that might have.