blank verse
1
7.7
- noun
- /blæŋk vɜrs/
- Literature
:
verso blanco
- Reuben Brower indicates not only the achievement of "breathlessness" and "hurrying" in the poem but also the role of Frost's blank verse in such pacing.
Examples
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And soon she found that she preferred blank verse, that she hadn't realized how intrusive the constant rhyme had been.
Fiction book (1993) -
Writing a narrative in stanzas instead of prose or a continuous poetic form such as blank verse has one very obvious effect: to divide the narrative up.
Academic text (2003) -
It's all here in blank verse.
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On another occasion, she wrote a tragedy in blank verse about a scientist who allowed himself to be corrupted by money and finally atoned for it by becoming a farmer.
Academic text (1993) -
In these works, she masterfully employed blank verse, free verse, heroic couplets, and irregular rhyme schemes.
Academic text (2016) -
The speaker writes the unrhymed, enjambing pentameter walk of Renaissance blank verse: "But I was going to say when Truth broke in / with all her matter-of-fact about the ice storm."
Academic text (2008) -
Shakespeare often used blank verse in his plays to give a natural flow to the dialogue.
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The poet experimented with blank verse to express complex emotions without the constraints of rhyme.
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In her latest poem, she decided to write in blank verse to capture the rhythm of her thoughts.
How Rhymed
Surface Forms
Morphology
The adjective 'blank' can be interpreted as 'empty' or 'without' and 'verse' as 'poetry', so learners may partly infer that it denotes poetry lacking something (giving some clue toward ‘without rhyme’). However, the precise technical sense—unrhymed verse, especially in iambic pentameter—is specialized and not fully predictable from the constituents, so prior exposure or instruction is needed.
Etymology
Blank verse comes from using blank to mean 'empty' and verse for a line of poetry. It described lines that did not 'rhyme', so today blank verse means poetry with a regular rhythm but without rhyme.