Blank verse is poetry written in unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. For a discussion of iambic pentameter, see Poetry (Foot-verse meters). This example of blank verse is from William Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar:
Loading the player...His life was gentle, and the elements So mixed in him that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, “This was a man!”
Shakespeare's use of blank verse
The American poet Robert Frost frequently wrote in blank verse. An example is the final lines of his 1916 poem “Birches”:
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree, And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Blank verse is not written in stanza form. Instead, the poem is developed in verse paragraphs that vary in length. Blank verse is a flexible form of expression that gives the poet a choice of many variations within the metrical pattern. Because of its flexibility, blank verse is especially appropriate for narrative and dramatic poetry and other longer kinds of poetry. Blank verse is sometimes confused with free verse. But free verse, unlike blank verse, has no definite meter.
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, adapted blank verse from Italian poetry to English in the early 1500’s. Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare used this form with great power and variety in their plays. Many poets of the 1800’s and 1900’s wrote in blank verse. They include William Wordsworth, William Cullen Bryant, John Keats, Lord Tennyson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Wallace Stevens.
See also Shakespeare, William (Verse form).
