Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use
“This conversational, engaging study offers a much-needed reconsideration of blank verse and the poets who explore its intricacies.Essential.”CHOICE“Robert B. Shaw’sBlank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Useis a popular study in the best sense of the word. It is written entirely without scholarly jargon. Its explanations are clear and direct, its examples abundant and well chosen. Its author knows his subject intimately well.”Eclectica“Shaw’s research and instruction bring new music to this most familiar rhythm, updating our understanding and enlivening the conversation.”American Poet“Shaw‘s eminently readable volume is a fine guide to how blank verse has been written, and especially for how it may be taken up by aspirant poets. Its efforts to serve as comprehensive survey and instructive commentary at once could hardly be more successful.”Pleiades“At the conclusion ofBlank Verse, one feels admiring gratitude to Robert B. Shaw, who has guided us with such imaginative care for a particular verse medium and also for the larger enterprise of poetry.”William H. Pritchard —Modern Philology“I am enthusiastic aboutBlank Verse. It’s based on a wide, sensitive reading of the tradition, and it deftly negotiates the demands of technical precision and clear exposition.”Thomas Cable — coauthor ofA History of the English Language“Robert B. Shaw’sBlank Verseis a remarkable history-in-little of the crucial question of poetry written in English that takes the form of blank verse or unrhymed iambic pentameter. William Shakespeare, John Milton, and William Wordsworth are necessarily the greatest poets analyzed by Shaw, but he gives particular emphasis to the twentieth century and to ongoing literary history. The book’s achievement is considerable: it offers accurate instruction in prosody and a vast store of curious and useful information about particular poets and their poems.”Harold Bloom, author ofThe Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages