"What is Blank Verse?": A Literary Guide for English Students and Teachers

[@SWLF]

If you liked this video, let us know by dropping us a comment on your favorite example of blank verse! Doing so will help us to build a rich digital learning environment around this important topic in literature.

[@Khatoon170]

Blank verse is poem with regular meter and no rhyme scheme . There is not set meter : however, iambic pentameter used commonly. It’s has been popular form of poetry since 1600s . Blank verse is typically used for longer , narrative poems . Blank verse creates formal , rhythmic pattern to spoken words . As result often captures attention of readers and listeners when character is going to reveal important information. Blank verse have eleven syllable lines is normal is line of 5+ 6 syllables with medial caesura, primary stress on fourth and tenth syllables of feminine endings on both half lines . Among modern poets hart crane and Wallace Stevens are two best known American practitioners of blank verse . Romantic English poets such as William Wordsworth, Percy bysse Shelley, John Keats . Thank you for your wonderful educational literary channel.

[@Khatoon170]

Blank verse is literally term that refers to poetry written in unrhymed , but metered lines always iambic pentameter. For example lippo lipp ( 1855) by Robert browning and second coming ( 1920) by w. B yeats . Blank verse is closely associated with free verse . However, latter has no meter . First blank verse appeared in 16 th century Italy during renaissance adaptation of unrhymed poetry, from Ancient Greece and Rome . Thank you for your wonderful educational literary channel.

[@Jivermo]

Thank you! I picked up a copy of “Key Largo”, by Sherwood Anderson. Overshadowed by the Bogart film, the play is little known today. I read that Anderson wrote it using blank verse, and wanted to understand what that meant. Your explanation has done it. Also learned enjambment. A double play!

[@SWLF]

Nice! We love Sherwood Anderson, but we're only familiar with his short stories. We'll have to check it out. And we're delighted that you found the lesson useful. Thanks so much for keeping the conversation going!

[@theexpresidents]

​@@SWLFoh, and you use "we." Yeah, that was quick. Bye.

[@chessematics]

"If you want to be taken seriously as a poet, you have to use blank verse at some point." Golden words. I AM actually trying blank verse in a poem of mine. Let's see how it goes.

[@SWLF]

Good luck to you, Chessematics!

[@richardglady3009]

Thank you. I love the ending and the intro to free verse. It was an excellent lecture that used great examples. I may not be able to understand all the intricacies of these poems, you have helped me get a beginning of understanding and creating. I love the term “enjambment…” there should be a tshirt, somewhere, with that word. More importantly, the concept helped me better understand how and why a person read a blank verse war poem.

[@SWLF]

Ha! OK, you've just given us an idea for our next SWLF tshirt! Thanks for all the great comments, Richard.

[@richardglady3009]

@@SWLF thank you, for responding to me. It means a lot to me. Like many college students (40 years ago), I didn’t take enough English classes. Thanks to your channel and others, I can recover a little of what I lost. That is why I will always do my best to say, “thank you.” Please keep me apprised on the tshirts. Thank you.

[@williamthompson467]

'To His Coy Mistress' is written in tetrameter not hexameter. Metre refers to the number of feet, not the number of syllables. Also, rhyme doesn't prevent the use of enjambment, nor does it prevent the creation of tension between syntax and lineation, nor does it oblige the poet to formulate their thoughts in neat couplets. 'To Coy Mistress', in fact, uses enjambment, syntactical\metrical tension and sentences that are up to eight lines long. It seems to me you have misunderstood the two main targets of Milton's objection: firstly, that rhyme was too often used by his contemporaries to camouflage the banality of their ideas and their clunky scansion ('to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter' ); and, secondly, that 'to all judicious ears', the sonic effect of the use of rhyme - and particularly rhymed couplets - trivialises rather than elevates. Hence their comparison to 'jingling sounds'. He is essentially criticising the prosodic laziness that rhyme can invite, if not used judiciously. Also, Milton refers specifically to the writing of epic poetry, hence his reference to Homer and Virgil. It is about the relationship between rhyme, tone and subject, not the inherent ability of rhyme to express complex ideas. The so-called 'metaphysical poets', after all, wrote almost exclusively in rhyme and closed form.

[@SWLF]

Thanks for the comment, William! You are right that Prof. Gottlieb misspoke about the meter of Marvell's poem: the meter is in tetrameter rather than hexameter. We have quite a bit to get through in a short amount of time in each lesson, and we're happy to admit our mistakes when they arise. On that same subject, in the interest in keeping things short to fit the KZbin format, we've had to sacrifice some complexity in all of our readings, and we're delighted that the comments section has started to serve as a space to get into those details. Thanks for keeping the conversation going!

[@Gobamba]

Thank you! Was reading Marshall McLuhan's "Gutenberg's Galaxy" and he mentions blank verses (something that I, as a brazilian, never heard of).

[@SWLF]

Nice! We're delighted to hear that you found the lesson useful, @Gobamba . And McLuhan is just the best, isn't he?

[@diamonicadm3863]

Our assignment: write a blank verse poem x iambic pentameter... Now I think I know what to do. Thank you for this video..

[@SWLF]

Awesome! We're so happy to hear you liked the video and found it useful to you. We hope you enjoy the other videos in the series as well!

[@siktayadav1379]

The video was quite of a life saver..very engaging and enlightening simultaneously.Thank you so much.

[@SWLF]

Thanks so much, Sikta! We hope you enjoy the other videos in our series as well!

[@SamDurkSheff]

This was excellent and really helpful, both explained things but also encouraged me to dive a bit deeper. Happy to report you've just got me to purchase a copy of 'Paradise Lost' which I'm now eagerly awaiting.

[@SWLF]

Excellent! Thanks for the high praise, @Kallos . And check out our "What is Poetic Meter?" video for more on Milton!

[@aishawahidj2712]

References helped a lot to understand even better. Explained quite good!

[@SWLF]

Thanks so much for your kinds words, Aisha! We hope you enjoy the other videos in our series as well!

[@johnmcphee3136]

This video is quite brilliant. I used to think that rhyming verse was the only good form of poetry, but this has seriously changed my view in a matter of only eight minutes. I've always lamented the fact that poetry often seems so forced while ignoring the subtle rhythmic verse in front of me. That being said, I find that I tend to naturally include rhyme when I write in metre and when I try to force myself not to rhyme I just end up in free verse. Are there any tips to help with this or is the answer just to practice loads?

[@SWLF]

Thanks so much for this post and question, John! As far as tips go (and keeping in mind that we are all mostly literary critics rather than creative writers), part of the usefulness of literary terms is simply to give a name and form to a given practice. If you know what to call something, you know what to look for in your reading and, perhaps, your revisions to you own work. The blank verse form has, during the 20th century, given way to both free verse and what has often been called "relaxed iambic pentameter," which was championed by Robert Frost. Checking out how he adopts the form (and seeing how poets after him, in turn, continued to produce poems in that mode) will be helpful to seeing how it can accommodate a variety of subjects new and old.

[@minakumari1515]

Thanks for this. It helped a lot and explained vey thoroughly

[@SWLF]

Thanks so much, Meenakshi! We hope you enjoy the other videos in our series as well!

[@hemalakshmi4250]

Thank you so much sir, brilliant explanation 👏 😇

[@SWLF]

Excellent! Thanks, Hema!

[@Hirosada]

I never did get blank verse. What happens when someone with a regional accent pronounces words differently, changing the stress patterns? The whole thing unravels like a cheap sweater. What's the point of a poem that ceases to be a poem when it's read by someone from Southie or Long Island.

[@SWLF]

Interesting question, Chris! While English, of course, differs across time and region, we're not sure if the stresses necessarily shift all that much as pronunciation changes. But we do hope that English poetry can "travel" through time and space in the same way that different people can find way to share their experiences and idea in spite of profound differences in their worldviews. That is, after all, one of the great values of literature--it makes us feel connected to the past by inhabiting their worldview (and, perhaps, their speech patterns) if only for a moment.

[@theexpresidents]

Underrated comment.

[@user-or7ji5hv8y]

Doesn’t blank verse sacrifice clarity given how it free itself from even proper punctuation?

[@SWLF]

Interesting. We agree with you (and Prof Gottlieb here) that Milton is difficult to read, but we also agree with Prof Gottlieb that the challenges of his syntax make his work more interesting as a result.

[@uranusgemini3388]

Hello. Can anyone tell us how the speech of Lawrence Washington below measures up?

[@stephaniech.5502]

Althought I very much appreciated this explanation, I disagree with the fact that you need to write in blank verse to leave a mark as a poet. It's not like it's harder or something. Rhymes and metric are harder to achieve succesfully, in my opinion. Personally, I find poems without rhyme less beautiful, and to me, blank verse, or even worse, free verse, just reads like normal prose where the author decides to continue a sentence in the next line often times. I guess it's a matter of taste...

[@SWLF]

Thanks so much for the comment, Stephanie! We certainly wouldn't say that blank verse is the only way to make your mark as a poet. In this video, Professor Gottlieb was instead showing how Milton and the people who followed him viewed the subject. To our mind, there is room for many different kinds of poetry to be read and studied by any student of literature,. Thanks for keeping the conversation going!

[@stephaniech.5502]

@@SWLF Thanks for the clarification :)

[@aalliiaa1212]

Can you make a video on syntax?

[@SWLF]

Thanks for the suggestion, Alia! We'll add it to our list.

[@user-cy7pi4xk7c]

0:40 3:32

[@user-or7ji5hv8y]

Why not write a novel then if he didn’t want to be shackled by rhyme?

[@SWLF]

Interesting question, C! Here are a couple ways to answer that one. First, the novel as a genre hadn't been established at that point (it is more of an 18th century phenomenon in English). In addition, Milton self-consciously writes in the epic form of Homer in order to establish his own project as of a similar ambition. Blank verse is an undoubtedly difficult form in which to write a long work, and the fact that he succeeded in doing so contributes to our sense of Paradise Lost as a masterpiece.

[@zellesev1240]

So cool

[@SWLF]

Thanks so much, Zelle! We hope you enjoy the other videos in our series as well!

[@nigelpollitt980]

In what world is it easier to comprehend a lecture with a string section playing in the background? Very distracting, real shame.

[@SWLF]

Thanks for the comment, Nigel. We go back and forth on the question of whether to include music or not in our videos, and this suggestion will be useful to us going forward.

[@nigelpollitt980]

@@SWLF Thanks. I think it can work during video title sequences, but in anything didactic, for me, it distracts. The video on blank verse is otherwise very good indeed.

[@SWLF]

@@nigelpollitt980 Thanks for this suggestion, Nigel. Yes, we think that might be a good compromise. And thanks for the positive word about the lesson! We hope you enjoy the other videos in the series as well.

[@ezraelliott2217]

Mans fighting for his life lmao

[@marwanalshater665]

I need it in Thired Year in my University... 👌🌼✌️ I love all v🌸

[@SWLF]

Nice! We're happy to hear the video is being put to good use!

[@karenbarnacle3660]

A great short introduction to blank verse, but please lose the background music. It is distracting and creates a real jarring effect against the words of Milton and Wordsworth. I kept envisioning cute kittens and puppies in those funny youtube bids for viral status.

[@SWLF]

Thanks for the feedback, Karen! We go back and forth on the question of background music and will keep your comment in mind as we make future videos in the series.

[@thefathers5870]

Cool

[@SWLF]

Thanks so much, The Fathers! We hope you enjoy the other videos in our series as well!

[@languagetv4756]

gd

[@turkmusik]

This is good but the idiotic background tinkling is not.

[@SWLF]

Ha! Thanks for the comment, turkmusik. We'll keep the music down in future videos.

[@tomkent4656]

Great video. Shame about the unnecessary and annoying music.

[@SWLF]

Thanks for the comment, tomkent4656! Editing the videos has certainly been a challenge, and we'll try to do better with the sound in future videos.

[@theexpresidents]

Eh, it looks like someone reading from a teleprompter. Which does not equal views.

[@SWLF]

It is even worse than that, Expresidents! Each video transcript is edited-sometimes two or three times!-for accuracy and concision. We’ll try to do better going forward.

[@ryan10001]

Bro should blink more