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History of English Blank Verse

The earliest blank verse consisted of end-stopped and regular lines; Gorboduc (1561), the first blank-verse tragedy, illustrates how monotonous such verse could be. Marlowe and then Shakespeare developed its potential greatly in the late 16th century. Marlowe was the first to exploit the potential of blank verse for powerful and involved speech:

You stars that reign'd at my nativity,

Whose influence hath alloted death and hell,

Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist

Into the entrails of yon labouring clouds,

That when they vomit forth into the air,

My limbs may issue from their smoky mouths,

So that my soul may but ascend to Heaven.

(Doctor Faustus)

Shakespeare developed this feature, and also the potential of blank verse for abrupt and irregular speech. The earliest effects were like these:

Death?

My lord?

A grave.

He shall not live.

(King John), 3.3

Shakespeare also used enjambment increasingly often in his verse, and in his last plays was given to using feminine endings (in which the last syllable of the line is unstressed, for instance lines 3 and 6 of the example); all of this made his later blank verse extremely rich and varied.

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,

And ye that on the sands with printless foot

Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him

When he comes back; you demi-puppets that

By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make

Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime

Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice

To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,

Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimmed

The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,

And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault

Set roaring war - to the dread rattling thunder

Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak

With his own bolt;...

(The Tempest, 5.1)

This very free treatment of blank verse was imitated by Shakespeare's contemporaries, and led to general metrical looseness in the hands of less skilled users. However, Shakespearean blank verse was used with some success by John Webster and Thomas Middleton in their plays. Ben Jonson, meanwhile, used a tighter blank verse with less enjambment in his great comedies Volpone and The Alchemist.

Blank verse was not much used in the non-dramatic poetry of the 17th century until Paradise Lost, in which Milton used it with much licence and tremendous skill. Milton used the flexibility of blank verse, its capacity to support syntactic complexity, to the utmost, in passages such as these:

into what Pit thou seest

From what highth fal'n, so much the stronger provd

He with his Thunder: and till then who knew

The force of those dire Arms? yet not for those

Nor what the Potent Victor in his rage

Can else inflict do I repent or change,

Though chang'd in outward lustre; that fixt mind

And high disdain, from sence of injur'd merit,

That with the mightiest rais'd me to contend,

And to the fierce contention brought along

Innumerable force of Spirits arm'd

That durst dislike his reign, and me preferring,

His utmost power with adverse power oppos'd

In dubious Battel on the Plains of Heav'n,

And shook his throne. What though the field be lost?

All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,

And study of revenge, immortal hate,

And courage never to submit or yield:

(Paradise Lost, Book 1)

Milton also wrote Paradise Regained and parts of Samson Agonistes in blank verse.

In the century after Milton, there are few distinguished uses of either dramatic or non-dramatic blank verse; in keeping with the desire for regularity, most of the blank verse of this period is somewhat stiff. The best examples of blank verse from this time are probably John Dryden's tragedy All For Love and James Thomson's The Seasons. A notably unsuccessful piece is John Dyer's The Fleece.

The next major poet in blank verse was William Wordsworth, who used it in many of the Lyrical Ballads (1798), The Prelude, The Excursion etc. Wordsworth's verse recovers some of the freedom of Milton's, but is generally far more regular. It is often tedious and prosaic, but at its best it has a calm resonance that is almost unique to Wordsworth. Similarly, the blank verse of Keats in Hyperion is modelled on that of Milton, but takes fewer liberties with the pentameter and possesses the characteristic beauties of Keats's verse. Shelley's blank verse in The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound is closer to Elizabethan practice than to Milton's.

Of the Victorian writers in blank verse, the most prominent are Tennyson and Robert Browning. Tennyson's blank verse in poems like “Ulysses” and “The Princess” is musical and regular; his lyric “Tears, Idle Tears” is probably the first important example of the blank verse stanzaic poem. Browning's blank verse, in poems like “Fra Lippo Lippi”, is more abrupt and conversational.

One surprising place where blank verse turns up in Victorian times is in Gilbert & Sullivan's opera “Princess Ida”. Gilbert dialogue is in blank verse throughout (making this exception in the 13 Savoy operas - the other exceptional point is that it is in 3 Acts, not 2). Below is a delightful extract spoken by Princess Ida after singing the aria “Oh, goddess wise”.

Women of Adamant, fair neophytes-

Who thirst for such instruction as we give,

Attend, while I unfold a parable.

The elephant is mightier than man,

Yet man subdues him. Why? The elephant

Is elephantine everywhere but here (tapping her forehead)

And man, whose brain is to the elephant's

As Woman's brain to man's - (that's rule of three),-

Conquers the foolish giant of the woods,

As woman, in her turn, shall conquer man.

In Mathematics, Woman leads the way:

The narrow-minded pedant still believes

That two and two make four! Why, we can prove,

We women-household drudges as we are-

That two and two make five-or three-or seven;

Or five-and-twenty, if the case demands!

Blank verse, of varying degrees of regularity, has been used quite frequently throughout the 20th century in original verse and in translations of narrative verse. Most of Robert Frost's narrative and conversational poems are in blank verse; so are other important poems like Wallace Stevens's “The Idea of Order at Key West” and “The Comedian as the Letter C”, W. B. Yeats's “The Second Coming”, W. H. Auden's “The Watershed”, and so on. A complete listing is impossible, since a sort of loose blank verse has become a staple of lyric poetry, but it would be safe to say that blank verse is as prominent now as it has been any time in the past three hundred years.

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