Blank Verse

Confused as to what blank verse is, look no further than

the writings of William Shakespeare. Renowned for

perfecting the craft Marlowe reveled in, the first known

usage of blank verse was an interpretation of a 1^st

century Latin poem called Aeneid by Henry Howard,

Earl of Arundel and Surrey (1554).

 

After Shakespeare, Milton’s Paradise Lost was one of

the last blank verse dramas written, as this form was

increasingly going out of fashion (to be replaced, for a

century and a half, by the verse “couplets”). Later on,

blank verse was revived by romantic poets, most

famously by Alfred Lord Tennyson in “Ulysses.”

 

Recently used in MacKinlay Kantor’s 1945 war novella

“Glory for Me”, blank verse was utilized to present the

struggles of returning WWII veterans. Blank verse still

remains, to this day, a prominent form of writing.