Blank Verse A Guide to Its History and Use Book

An excellent guide to the most popular metric format in the English language, and thus a good guide to the development of English and American poetry in general.

Covers the introduction of blank verse by Surrey's translation of the Aeneid, Marlowe's adoption of the meter for the theater, Shakespeare's explosive development of its dramatic possibilities, and finally Milton's returning of the meter to the epic in Paradise Lost.

The book then follows Coleridge and Wordsworth's rejection of the couplet trend of their era to strip blank verse of its lofty, Miltonian frame and bring it to bear on their lyric and natural topics.

Later chapters include an excellent survey of Frost's prosody and a contrast of it to Yeats, as well as thorough examinations of contemporary application of blank verse.

Shaw introduces metrical techniques as they are developed historically, such as feminine endings, anapestic substitution, syllable elision, and the like. He also makes sound recommendations to poets today.

Obviously, a book-length study of prosody can occasionally seem myopic, and Shaw has a tendency to read into accentual patterns too much significance, significance that is better understood by other poetic elements of the line. But his obsession over syllable stress is a great way of training one's ear, and reading with Shaw is like watching a piano tuner working his little forks.