Blank Verse

Blank Verse

🔹 Blank verse is a literary device defined as un-rhyming verse written in iambic pentameter. In poetry and prose, it has a consistent meter with 10 syllables in each line (pentameter); where, unstressed syllables are followed by stressed ones and five of which are stressed but do not rhyme. It is also known as un-rhymed iambic pentameter.                      
🔹 The Earl of Surrey introduced blank verse in English literature in 1540. Milton, Shakespeare, Marlowe, John Donne, John Keats and many other poets and dramatists have used this device in their works.                        
🔹Blank verse poetry has no fixed number of lines.

🔹It has a conventional meter that is used for verse drama and long narrative poems.

🔹It is often used in descriptive and reflective poems and dramatic monologues— the poems in which  single character delivers his thoughts in the form of a speech.

🔹Blank verse can be composed in any kind of meter, such as iamb, trochee, spondee and dactyl.                      
🔹The Structure of a Blank Verse Poem

1. Five feet of iambic syllables

2. Sounding
 du DUM du DUM du DUM du DUM du DUM

3.Each foot making the verse sound like it has heart beat rhythm.                      
🔹 It appeared for the first time in drama in Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton's Gorboduc                      
🔹 Earl of Surrey introduced blank verse in his translation of Books 2 and 4 of Virgil's Aeneid                        
🔹 eg.
Paradise Lost (1667)
The Seasons (1726-30)
The Prelude (1805)
Idylls of the King (1891)
The Ring and the Book (1868-69)
The Waste Land (1922)
Aurora Leigh