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Blank verse is a type of poetry
Poetry

Poetry is a form of literature art in which language is used for its aesthetics and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning ....
, distinguished by having a regular meter
Meter (poetry)

In poetry, the meter is the basic rhythm of a verse . Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse meter, or a certain set of meters alternating in a particular order....
, but no rhyme
Rhyme

A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more different words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes....
. In English, the meter most commonly used with blank verse has been iambic pentameter
Iambic pentameter

Iambic pentameter is a type of meter that is used in poetry and drama. It describes a particular rhythm that the words establish in each Line ....
 (like that which is used in Shakespearean plays).

The first known use of blank verse in the English language was by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey Order of the Garter was an England aristocrat, and one of the founders of English Renaissance poetry....
 in his interpretation of the Æneid (c. 1554). He was possibly inspired by the Latin
Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
 original, as classical Latin verse (as well as Greek verse) did not use rhyme; or he may have been inspired by the Italian
Italian language

Italian is a Romance languages spoken by about 63 million people as a first language, primarily in Italy. In Switzerland, Italian is one of four Linguistic geography of Switzerlands....
 verse form of Versi Sciolti , which also contained no rhyme. The unknown author of Arden of Faversham
Arden of Faversham

Arden of Faversham is an Elizabethan theatre play, entered into the Register of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers on April 3, 1592, and printed later that same year by Edward White....
 (circa 1590) is the most interesting example of end-stopped
End-stopping

End-stopping is a feature in poetry in which the syntactic unit corresponds in length to the line. Its opposite is enjambment, where the sense runs on into the next line....
 blank verse.

Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe

Christopher "Kit" Marlowe was an Kingdom of England Playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. The foremost English Renaissance theatre tragedy next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his own mysterious and untimely death....
 was the first English author to make full use of the potential of blank verse, and also established it as the dominant verse form for English drama
Drama

Drama is the specific Mode of fiction Mimesis in performance. The term comes from a Ancient Greek word meaning "Action " , which is derived from "to do" ....
 in the age of Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I of England

Elizabeth I was List of English monarchs and Queen of Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death. Sometimes called The Virgin Queen, Gloriana, or Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth was the fifth and last monarch of the House of Tudor....
 and James I
James I of England

James VI and I was List of monarchs of Scotland as James VI, and List of English monarchs and King of Ireland as James I. He ruled in Kingdom of Scotland as James VI from 24 July 1567, when he was only one year old, succeeding his mother Mary I of Scotland....
.






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Blank verse is a type of poetry
Poetry

Poetry is a form of literature art in which language is used for its aesthetics and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning ....
, distinguished by having a regular meter
Meter (poetry)

In poetry, the meter is the basic rhythm of a verse . Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse meter, or a certain set of meters alternating in a particular order....
, but no rhyme
Rhyme

A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more different words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes....
. In English, the meter most commonly used with blank verse has been iambic pentameter
Iambic pentameter

Iambic pentameter is a type of meter that is used in poetry and drama. It describes a particular rhythm that the words establish in each Line ....
 (like that which is used in Shakespearean plays).

The first known use of blank verse in the English language was by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey Order of the Garter was an England aristocrat, and one of the founders of English Renaissance poetry....
 in his interpretation of the Æneid (c. 1554). He was possibly inspired by the Latin
Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
 original, as classical Latin verse (as well as Greek verse) did not use rhyme; or he may have been inspired by the Italian
Italian language

Italian is a Romance languages spoken by about 63 million people as a first language, primarily in Italy. In Switzerland, Italian is one of four Linguistic geography of Switzerlands....
 verse form of Versi Sciolti , which also contained no rhyme. The unknown author of Arden of Faversham
Arden of Faversham

Arden of Faversham is an Elizabethan theatre play, entered into the Register of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers on April 3, 1592, and printed later that same year by Edward White....
 (circa 1590) is the most interesting example of end-stopped
End-stopping

End-stopping is a feature in poetry in which the syntactic unit corresponds in length to the line. Its opposite is enjambment, where the sense runs on into the next line....
 blank verse.

Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe

Christopher "Kit" Marlowe was an Kingdom of England Playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. The foremost English Renaissance theatre tragedy next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his own mysterious and untimely death....
 was the first English author to make full use of the potential of blank verse, and also established it as the dominant verse form for English drama
Drama

Drama is the specific Mode of fiction Mimesis in performance. The term comes from a Ancient Greek word meaning "Action " , which is derived from "to do" ....
 in the age of Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I of England

Elizabeth I was List of English monarchs and Queen of Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death. Sometimes called The Virgin Queen, Gloriana, or Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth was the fifth and last monarch of the House of Tudor....
 and James I
James I of England

James VI and I was List of monarchs of Scotland as James VI, and List of English monarchs and King of Ireland as James I. He ruled in Kingdom of Scotland as James VI from 24 July 1567, when he was only one year old, succeeding his mother Mary I of Scotland....
. The major achievements in English blank verse were made by William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English people poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's preeminent dramatist....
, who wrote much of the content of his plays in unrhymed iambic pentameter, and Milton
John Milton

John Milton II was an English poet, author, polemicist and civil servant for the Commonwealth of England. He is best known for his Epic poetry Paradise Lost and for his treatise condemning censorship, Areopagitica....
, whose Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century England poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books....
 is written in blank verse. Miltonic blank verse was widely imitated in the 18th century by such poets as James Thomson (in The Seasons) and William Cowper
William Cowper

William Cowper was an English poet and hymnodist. One of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper changed the direction of 18th century nature poetry by writing of everyday life and scenes of the English countryside....
 (in The Task). Romantic
Romantic poetry

Romanticism largely began as a reaction against the prevailing Age of Enlightenment ideals of the day. Inevitably, the characterization of a broad range of contemporaneous poets and poetry under the single unifying name can be viewed more as an exercise in historical compartmentalization than an actual attempt to capture the essence of the ac...
 English poets such as William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was a major England Romantic poetry poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romanticism in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
, Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major England Romantic poets and is widely considered to be among the finest Lyric poetry in the English language....
, and John Keats
John Keats

John Keats was an England poetry who became one of the principal poets of the English Romanticism movement during the early nineteenth century....
 used blank verse as a major form. Shortly afterwards, Alfred Lord Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom and remains one of the most popular English poets.Tennyson excelled at penning short lyrics, including "In the valley of Cauteretz", "Break, break, break", "The Charge of the Light Brigade ", "Tears, Idle Tears" and "Crossing the Bar"....
 became particularly devoted to blank verse, using it for example in his long narrative poem "The Princess", as well as for one of his most famous poems: "Ulysses
Ulysses (poem)

"Ulysses" is a poem in blank verse by the Victorian era poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson , written in 1833 and published in 1842 in Tennyson's well-received second volume of poems....
". Among American poets, Hart Crane
Hart Crane

Harold Hart Crane was an United States poet. Finding both inspiration and provocation in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote poetry that was traditional in form, difficult and often Archaism in language, and which sought to express something more than the ironic despair that Crane found in Eliot's poetry....
 and Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was a United States Modernism poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and spent most of his life working for an insurance company in Connecticut....
 are notable for using blank verse in extended compositions at a time when many other poets were turning to free verse
Free verse

Free Verse poetry does not have a strict pattern of rhyming. It does not have regular meter, rhyme, fixed line length, or a specific stanza pattern....
.

Russian
Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
 bylina
Bylina

Bylina is a traditional Epic poetry, heroic narrative poem of the early East Slavs of Kievan Rus. This poetic tradition continued in Russia and Ukraine....
s are in blank verse.

History of English blank verse


Gorboduc
Gorboduc (play)

Gorboduc, also titled Ferrex and Porrex, was an English play from 1561. It was performed before Queen Elizabeth I on January 18 1562, by the Gentlemen of the Inner Temple....
 (1561), the first blank-verse tragedy, illustrates how monotonous such verse could be. Marlowe and then Shakespeare developed its potential greatly in the late 16th century. Marlowe was the first to exploit the potential of blank verse for powerful and involved speech:

You stars that reign'd at my nativity,
Whose influence hath allotted death and hell,
Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist
Into the entrails of yon labouring clouds,
That when they vomit forth into the air,
My limbs may issue from their smoky mouths,
So that my soul may but ascend to Heaven.


Shakespeare developed this feature, and also the potential of blank verse for abrupt and irregular speech. For example, in this quote from King John
King John

The Life and Death of King John, a history play by William Shakespeare, dramatises the reign of King John of England , son of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine and father of Henry III of England....
, one blank verse line is broken between two characters:

My lord?
A grave.
He shall not live.
Enough.


Shakespeare also used enjambment
Enjambment

Enjambment is the breaking of a syntactic unit by the end of a line or between two Verse . It is to be contrasted with end-stopping, where each Language unit corresponds with a single line, and caesura, in which the linguistic unit ends mid-line....
 increasingly often in his verse, and in his last plays was given to using feminine endings (in which the last syllable of the line is unstressed, for instance lines 3 and 6 of the following example); all of this made his later blank verse extremely rich and varied.

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,
Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimmed
The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war - to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt;...
(The Tempest, 5.1)


This very free treatment of blank verse was imitated by Shakespeare's contemporaries, and led to general metrical looseness in the hands of less skilled users. However, Shakespearean blank verse was used with some success by John Webster
John Webster

John Webster was an England Literature in English#Jacobean literature dramatist best known for his tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, often regarded as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage....
 and Thomas Middleton
Thomas Middleton

Thomas Middleton was an England English Renaissance theatre and poet. Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson as among the most successful and prolific of playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period....
 in their plays. Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson

Benjamin Jonson was an England English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satire plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist , and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his Lyric poetry poems....
, meanwhile, used a tighter blank verse with less enjambment in his great comedies Volpone
Volpone

Volpone is a comedy by Ben Jonson first produced in 1606, drawing on elements of city comedy, black comedy and animal fable. A merciless satire of greed and lust, it remains Jonson's most-performed play, and it is among the finest English literature#Jacobean literature comedies....
 and The Alchemist
The Alchemist (play)

The Alchemist is a comedy by English literature playwright Ben Jonson. First performed in 1610 in literature by the King's Men, it is generally considered Jonson's best and most characteristic comedy; Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that it had one of the three most perfect plots in literature....
.

Blank verse was not much used in the non-dramatic poetry of the 17th century until Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century England poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books....
, in which Milton used it with much license and tremendous skill. Milton used the flexibility of blank verse, its capacity to support syntactic complexity, to the utmost, in passages such as these:

into what Pit thou seest
From what highth fal'n, so much the stronger provd
He with his Thunder: and till then who knew
The force of those dire Arms? yet not for those
Nor what the Potent Victor in his rage
Can else inflict do I repent or change,
Though chang'd in outward lustre; that fixt mind
And high disdain, from sence of injur'd merit,
That with the mightiest rais'd me to contend,
And to the fierce contention brought along
Innumerable force of Spirits arm'd
That durst dislike his reign, and me preferring,
His utmost power with adverse power oppos'd
In dubious Battel on the Plains of Heav'n,
And shook his throne. What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:


Milton also wrote Paradise Regained
Paradise Regained

Paradise Regained is a poem by the 17th century England poet John Milton, published in 1671. It is connected by name to his earlier and more famous epic poem Paradise Lost, with which it shares similar theology theme s....
 and parts of Samson Agonistes
Samson Agonistes

Samson Agonistes is a tragedy closet drama by John Milton. It appeared with the publication of Milton's Paradise Regained in 1671, as the title page of that volume states: "Paradise Regained / A Poem / In IV Books / To Which Is Added / Samson Agonistes"....
 in blank verse.

In the century after Milton, there are few distinguished uses of either dramatic or non-dramatic blank verse; in keeping with the desire for regularity, most of the blank verse of this period is somewhat stiff. The best examples of blank verse from this time are probably John Dryden
John Dryden

John Dryden was an influential English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who dominated the literary life of English Restoration to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden....
's tragedy All for Love and James Thomson's The Seasons. An example notable as much for its failure with the public as for its subsequent influence on the form is John Dyer's The Fleece.

At the close of the eighteenth century, William Cowper
William Cowper

William Cowper was an English poet and hymnodist. One of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper changed the direction of 18th century nature poetry by writing of everyday life and scenes of the English countryside....
 ushered in a renewal of blank verse with his volume of kaleidoscopic meditations, "The Task", published in 1784. After Shakespeare and Milton, Cowper was the main influence on the next major poets in blank verse, teenagers when Cowper published his masterpiece. These were the Lake Poets
Lake Poets

The Lake Poets all lived in the Lake District of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of thought or literary practice then known, although their works were uniformly disparaged by the Edinburgh Review....
 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an England poet, critic and Philosophy who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romanticism in England and one of the Lake Poets....
. Wordsworth used the form for many of the Lyrical Ballads
Lyrical Ballads

Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature....
 (1798 and 1800), and for his longest efforts, The Prelude
The Prelude

The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind is an autobiographical, "philosophical" poem in blank verse by the England poet William Wordsworth....
 and The Excursion. Wordsworth's verse recovers some of the freedom of Milton's, but is generally far more regular. It is often tedious and prosaic, but at its best it has a calm resonance that is almost unique to Wordsworth. Coleridge's blank verse is technically dazzling, but he wrote little of it: so-called "conversation Poems" such as "The Aeolian Harp" and "Frost at Midnight" are the best known of his blank verse works. The blank verse of Keats
John Keats

John Keats was an England poetry who became one of the principal poets of the English Romanticism movement during the early nineteenth century....
 in Hyperion
Hyperion (poem)

"Hyperion" is an uncompleted epic poetry by 19th-century England Romanticism poet John Keats. It is based on the Titanomachy, and tells of the despair of the Titans after their fall to the Olympians....
 is mainly modelled on that of Milton, but takes fewer liberties with the pentameter and possesses the characteristic beauties of Keats's verse. Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major England Romantic poets and is widely considered to be among the finest Lyric poetry in the English language....
's blank verse in The Cenci
The Cenci

The Cenci is a verse drama by Percy Bysshe Shelley written in the summer of 1819, and inspired by a real Italian family, the Cencis . The play was not considered performable in its day due to its themes of incest and parricide, and was not performed in public in London until 1922....
 and Prometheus Unbound
Prometheus Unbound

Prometheus Unbound is a four-act play by Percy Bysshe Shelley first published in 1820, concerned with the torments of the Greek mythology figure Prometheus and his suffering at the hands of Zeus....
 is closer to Elizabethan practice than to Milton's.

Of the Victorian writers in blank verse, the most prominent are Tennyson and Robert Browning
Robert Browning

Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian literature poets....
. Tennyson's blank verse in poems like "Ulysses" and "The Princess" is musical and regular; his lyric "Tears, Idle Tears" is probably the first important example of the blank verse stanzaic poem. Browning's blank verse, in poems like "Fra Lippo Lippi", is more abrupt and conversational. Gilbert and Sullivan
Gilbert and Sullivan

'Gilbert and Sullivan' refers to the Victorian era partnership of librettist W. S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan . Together, they wrote fourteen comic operas between 1871 and 1896, of which H.M.S....
's 1884 opera, Princess Ida
Princess Ida

Princess Ida, or Castle Adamant, is a comic opera with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. It was their eighth operatic collaboration of fourteen....
, is based on Tennyson's "The Princess". Gilbert's dialogue is in blank verse throughout (although the other 13 Savoy opera
Savoy opera

The Savoy Operas denote a style of comic opera that developed in Victorian England in the late 19th century, with W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan as the original and most successful practitioners....
s have prose dialogue). Below is an extract spoken by Princess Ida after singing her entrance aria "Oh, goddess wise".

Women of Adamant, fair neophytes-
Who thirst for such instruction as we give,
Attend, while I unfold a parable.
The elephant is mightier than Man,
Yet Man subdues him. Why? The elephant
Is elephantine everywhere but here (tapping her forehead)
And Man, whose brain is to the elephant's
As Woman's brain to Man's - (that's rule of three),-
Conquers the foolish giant of the woods,
As Woman, in her turn, shall conquer Man.
In Mathematics, Woman leads the way:
The narrow-minded pedant still believes
That two and two make four! Why, we can prove,
We women-household drudges as we are-
That two and two make five-or three-or seven;
Or five-and-twenty, if the case demands!


Savitri is a 24,000 line poem in blank verse (and the longest poem in the English language) written by Sri Aurobindo, completed shortly before his death in 1950 in Pondicherry, India. The poem is based on the Mahabharata story of Satyavan and Savitri. In the poem, Sri Aurobindo describes the involution and evolution of the cosmos and of consciousness.

Blank verse, of varying degrees of regularity, has been used quite frequently throughout the 20th century in original verse and in translations of narrative verse. Most of Robert Frost
Robert Frost

Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech....
's narrative and conversational poems are in blank verse; so are other important poems like Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was a United States Modernism poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and spent most of his life working for an insurance company in Connecticut....
's "The Idea of Order at Key West" and "The Comedian as the Letter C", W. B. Yeats's "The Second Coming", W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden who signed his works W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century....
's "The Watershed" and John Betjeman's
John Betjeman

Sir John Betjeman, Order of the British Empire was an English poet, writer and Broadcasting who described himself in Who's Who as a "poet and hack"....
 Summoned by Bells
Summoned by Bells

Summoned by Bells, the blank verse autobiography by John Betjeman, describes his life from his early memories of a middle class home in Edwardian era Hampstead, London to his premature departure from Magdalen College, Oxford....
. MacKinlay Kantor
MacKinlay Kantor

MacKinlay Kantor was an American novelist and screenwriter who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956 for his 1955 novel Andersonville about the Andersonville National Historic Site in the American Civil War....
's 1945 novella of the struggles of returning World War II veterans, Glory for Me, which was the basis for the movie The Best Years of Our Lives
The Best Years of Our Lives

The Best Years of Our Lives is an Cinema of the United States drama film about three servicemen trying to piece their lives back together after coming home from World War II....
, was written in blank verse. A complete listing is impossible, since a sort of loose blank verse has become a staple of lyric poetry, but it would be safe to say that blank verse is as prominent now as it has been any time in the past three hundred years.

See also

  • Free verse
    Free verse

    Free Verse poetry does not have a strict pattern of rhyming. It does not have regular meter, rhyme, fixed line length, or a specific stanza pattern....