What is Blank Verse?

what is Blank Verse, Literary Terms blank verse

What is  Blank Verse

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Blank verse:

POETRY written in unrhymed IAMBIC PENTAMETER. The blank verse should not be confused with FREE VERSE. It is “blank” only in the sense that its lines do not RHYME; it is not metrically blank.

These famous lines from Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus exemplify the qualities of blank verse:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships

And burned the topless towers of Ilium?

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

Blank verse is uniquely suitable for poetic DRAMA and other long NARRATIVE or reflective poems because of its closeness to natural speech RHYTHMS, its lack of rhymė, and it's rhythmic flexibility.

Employed extensively and brilliantly in dramatic DIALOGUE by Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and the other ELIZABETHAN playwrights, developed by John Milton into a vehicle for his great Epic Paradise Lost, rediscovered by the nineteenth-century romantic poets, and revived in a freer form by T. S. Eliot and Maxwell Anderson in their verse plays, blank verse has been used for serious poetry more than any other English VERSE FORM.

See also:

Iambic pentameter.