English Literature / Unit 1 ENL 0016 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Blank Verse
Captions available
The idea
Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. Its first known use in English was the Earl of Surrey's translation of the Aeneid, about fifteen forty. It became the line of Marlowe's and Shakespeare's plays, Milton's Paradise Lost and Wordsworth's longer poems. A passage with regular meter and no rhyme is blank verse.
In practice
Meter, yes; rhyme, no.
Where people slip
Blank verse is not free verse.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
Unlocks
- 0017Free Verse
- 0038Hearing Meter in a Passage Under Time
- 0506Surrey, Blank Verse and the English Sonnet
- 0514Marlowe and the Mighty Line
- 0619Shakespeare's Verse and Prose
- 0806Paradise Lost: Subject, Form and Invocation
- 1121"Tintern Abbey"
- 1128The Prelude
- 1135"Frost at Midnight" and the Conversation Poem
- 1305"Ulysses"
- 1320Aurora Leigh
- 1817The Signature of Elizabethan Verse
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