When was blank verse first used

So Milton is very much setting himself up as their successor. In other words, there will be no childish or vulgar rhymes for Milton in Paradise Lost , since that would be beneath his epic ambition and would constrain his ability to tell the story he wants to tell. The very fact that Milton felt the need to defend his decision suggests, of course, that readers of his day would have expected to read rhyming verse. But couplets, while easily memorized, also tend to encourage their authors to keep their thoughts within the rigid demarcations of the rhyme itself.

And that, in a nutshell, is what blank verse allows Milton to do: form long, complex, periodic sentences. Note that in the opening lines of Paradise Lost I recited, the main subject of the passage — Heavenly Muse — does not even appear until the 6 th line! But precisely because Milton had used it so imperiously and ambitiously, it was primarily deployed for serious and elevated topics, usually of some length.

Shakespeare famously used iambic pentameter across his writings, such as in this excerpted monologue from Act 1 of Macbeth :. O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon gainst self-slaughter! O God, O God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! After being adapted by the English romantic poets like William Wordsworth and John Keats, blank verse as a form began to be utilized with more flexibility and looseness.

Poetry may subsist without rhyme, but English poetry will not often please; nor can rhyme ever be safely spared but where the subject is able to support itself. Blank verse makes some approach to that which is called the "lapidary style;" has neither the easiness of prose, nor the melody of numbers, and therefore tires by long continuance. National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. However, there is consistent meter in 10 syllables of each line.

It is following the iambic pentameter pattern with five feet in each line. Only the first line is written in trochee pattern. All the stressed syllables are marked in bold. But, woe is me , you are so sick of late, So far from cheer and from your former state, That I distrust you. Yet, though I distrust, Discomfort you, my lord, it nothing must. Hamlet gives us a perfect example of a typical blank verse, written in iambic pentameter.

Shakespeare employed the deliberate effort to use the syllables in a particular way. He brought variation by using caesuras pause in the middle of the line, as in the third line. Shakespeare has other literary pieces that are also good sources of blank verse examples. Marlowe developed this potential in the late 16th century. Marlowe was the first author who exploited the potential of blank verse for writing a powerful speech, as given here. The pattern utilized here is iambic pentameter. Just look at the above example in which the first line is written in regular pentameter.

However, there is a little variation in the stressed pattern in the following lines that is again revived in the last two lines, and does not follow any rhyme scheme.