"Blank verse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will call "An Idyll of Spring" in blank verse, without the blanks and without the verse, and will be continued ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... find yourself "cast" for a footman, with no more to do than to announce and usher in the principal personages of the piece, when you feel a strong (and perhaps well-grounded) conviction that you would have "made a hit" as the Prince in blank verse and blue velvet. Well! one must fall back on one's principles. Be loyal to the stage-manager. Help the piece through, whether it is or is not a pleasure and a triumph for you yourself. Set an example of willingness and good-humour. If to these first principles you add the amiable ...
— The Peace Egg and Other tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... like Keats, how soon he came to that unmistakable style of his own—to the utterance of those pure lyrics, "most musical, most melancholy"—"to the perfection of his matchless songs," and again, to the mastery of blank verse, that noblest measure, in "The Fisher and Charon"—to the grace and limpid narrative verse of "The King's Bell," to the feeling, wisdom—above all, to the imagination—of his loftier odes, among which that on ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... last night," said Jasmine; "I called it 'The Uses of Adversity.' It was very mournful indeed; it was a sort of story in blank verse of people who were cold and hungry, and I mixed up London fogs, and attic rooms, and curtains that were once white, and had now turned yellow, and sloppy streets covered with snow, with the story. It was really very sad, and I cried a great deal over it. I am looking ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... mask Comus and his rout dance a measure, after which he again speaks, but in a different strain. The change is marked by a return to blank verse: the previous lines are ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... instances to the contrary. Spenser was a consummate master of versification, and not only did Marlowe and Shakespeare learn of him, but I have little doubt that, but for the "Faery Queen," we should never have had the varied majesty of Milton's blank verse. ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... be ashamed of Dover; you would scruple to refer, sir, to a spot so paltry. To be idle at Dover is a strange pretension; pray, how do you warm yourself? If I were there I should grind knives or write blank verse, or - But at least you do not bathe? It is idle to deny it: I have - I may say I nourish - a growing jealousy of the robust, large-legged, healthy Britain-dwellers, patient of grog, scorners of the timid umbrella, innocuously breathing fog: all which I once was, and I ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in blank verse of a poor kind with occasional rhyming couplets. After a prologue begins "Actus Primus and ultimus"; there are only five scenes in all, and the whole is quite short. The characters consist of Iphidius, father of Pyramus; Labetrus, father of Thisbe; ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... rhythmical beat of verse. Take, for instance, such works as The Ring and the Book and Aurora Leigh. Is there anything whatever to be gained by the relentless drumming, under the surface of these imaginative narratives, of the stolid blank verse? Would not such compositions have gained by being written in pure poetical prose? The quality which at present directs writers to choosing verse-forms for poetical expression, apart from the traditions, is the need of condensation, and the sense of proportion ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... some particularly good reasons why you should," I said, striking an attitude which I had once seen a music-hall dramatist take when he was going to blast somebody's future—a stick with a star on top of it in his hand and forty lines of blank verse ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... will fill a volume when done. It is the novel or romance I have been hankering after so long, written in blank verse, in the autobiographical form; the heroine, an artist woman—not a painter, mind. It is intensely modern, crammed from the times (not the 'Times' newspaper) as far as my strength will allow. Perhaps you won't like it, perhaps you will. Who knows? ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... mirage. Our sole trouble was how to give this news to Nilkamal Babu with due decorum. We did it at last with considerable restraint, while the geometrical figures on the blackboard stared at us in wonder and the blank verse of the Meghnadvadha ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... compares it, both for length and variety of material, to the sermons of Jeremy Taylor and Hooker, Locke's and Hobbes's books of Philosophy, Blackstone's Commentaries, Percy's Ballads, and the writings of Newman, Pusey, and Keble,—all done into blank verse and incorporated with Paradise Lost. You have a martial poem like the Iliad, full of the gilt and scarlet and trumpetings and blazonry of war;—and you find the Bhagavad-Gita a chapter in it. Since it was first an epic, there have been huge accretions to it: Whosever fancy it struck would ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... to warp the judgement of the learned or unlearned reader, in favour of my own hypothesis. I attempted this translation, chiefly because I could find no other equally close and literal. Even the Version of Roscommon, tho' in blank verse, is, in some parts a paraphrase, and in others, but an abstract. I have myself, indeed, endeavoured to support my right to that force and freedom of translation which Horace himself recommends; yet I have faithfully exhibited ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... vindicated the possibility of the modern poetic drama by writing The Sunken Bell, his most far-reaching success both on the stage and in the study. In it appears for the first time the disciplinary effect of naturalism upon literature in its loftiest mood. The blank verse is the best in the German drama, the only German blank verse, in truth, that satisfies an ear trained on the graver and more flexible harmony of English; the lyrical portions are of sufficient if inferior ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... all along aimed: it runs thus:—"Poems in Bland Verse (not Dramatique) prior to Milton's Paradise Lost. Subsequent to Lord Surrey's in this Volume, and to N.G.'s in the preceding." In truth, Dr. Percy was making a collection in the two volumes of all the English undramatic blank verse he could discover, prior to the publication of Milton's great poem. He was guilty of some important omissions, because bibliographical knowledge was not then as far advanced as at present, but he performed good service to letters as far as ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... this MS., are growing pastoral ourselves, and Heaven forbid that we should venture into a field which one of our poets has recently brought into disrepute by his indifferent blank verse. ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... confession is contained in a report of some conversations given in the Bee for 1791. He was speaking about blank verse, to which he always had a dislike, as we know from an interesting incident mentioned by Boswell. Boswell, who attended Smith's lectures on English literature at Glasgow College in 1759, told Johnson four years after that Smith had pronounced a strong opinion in ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... added almost nothing to his permanent literary product. In 1869 he had published Under the Willows, a collection that contains some of his finest poems. In the same year The Cathedral was published, a stately poem in blank verse, profound in thought, with many passages of great poetic beauty. In 1888 a final collection of poems was published, entitled Heartsease and Rue, which opened with the memorial poem, Agassiz, an elegy that would not ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Ballyporeen, Babylon, Venice, and fifty other famous cities.' He always felt in these interviews, as if she and he were extemporising a burlesque—she the Queen of Crim Tartary, and he an Archbishop in her court—and would have spoken blank verse, only he feared she might perceive it, and ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Sketches of Blake, written between 1768 and 1777, and published in 1783, there appears an extraordinary poem written in blank verse, but divided into quatrains, and entitled Fair Elenor. This juvenile production seems to indicate that Blake was familiar with Walpole's Gothic story.[32] The heroine, wandering disconsolately by night in the castle vaults—a place of refuge first rendered fashionable by Isabella ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... Liggeinstein and re-sold those theatres in forty-eight hours at a handsome profit. It was Bones who did the buying, and it was Hamilton who did the selling—in this case, to the intense annoyance of Bones, who had sat up the greater part of one night writing a four-act play in blank verse, and arriving at the office late, had discovered that his chance of acting as his own producer ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... instance, that the grave and solemn speeches of Beowulf and Hrothgar be put in ballad measures, tripping lightly and airily along? Or, again, is it fitting that the rough martial music of Anglo-Saxon verse be interpreted to us in the smooth measures of modern blank verse? Do we hear what has been beautifully called "the clanging tread ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... the supreme excellence of Milton; but each wished for a little change to be made— which, and which only was wanted to perfection. Dr. Johnson, though he pretended to be satisfied with the 'Paradise Lost,' even in what he regarded as the undress of blank verse, still secretly wished it in rhyme. That's No. 1. Addison, though quite content with it in English, still could have wished it in Greek. That's No. 2. Bentley, though admiring the blind old poet in the highest degree, still observed, smilingly, ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... advertised a new edition, attractively illustrated, of the "Evenings at Home"—a joint work of Mrs. Barbauld's and her brother's, (the elder Dr. Aikin.) Mrs. Barbauld was exceedingly clever. Her mimicry of Dr. Johnson's style was the best of all that exist. Her blank verse "Washing Day," descriptive of the discomforts attending a mistimed visit to a rustic friend, under the affliction of a family washing, is picturesquely circumstantiated. And her prose hymns for children have left ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... fancy, and to listen to his exclamations of condensed criticism. He evidently found little to commend. As he opened or unrolled one after another, and caught the heading, or a line of the text, he dashed it to the floor, with a single word of contempt, disgust, or derision. "Faugh!" "Oh!" "Pshaw!" "Blank verse? Blank enough!" Some he lingered over for a moment, but his brow never cleared or relented, and each and all were condemned with equal justice and impartiality. When the last was thrown down, and he was certain that none ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... prose and verse; and the verse portion forms so large a part of the whole that the manner in which it is rendered is of much importance. Now this verse is not analogous to the iambic trimeter of Sophocles or the blank verse of Shakspere, but roughly corresponds to the Greek choruses or the occasional rhymed songs of the Elizabethan stage. In other words, the verse portion of a Sanskrit drama is not narrative; it is sometimes descriptive, ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... "Well, to adopt your elegant phraseology, Master Ralph, I bet I will produce the same story, with the same conclusion, but a different moral, in an hour—since you allow me twice the time I named—if I may be permitted to write it in blank verse, that is, and of course, with the understanding that what I write is not intended to be ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... more and more confirmed in the opinion which I expressed at its commencement, that (whatever may be the extent of my own individual failure) "if justice is ever to be done to the easy flow and majestic simplicity of the grand old Poet, it can only be in the Heroic blank verse." I have seen isolated passages admirably rendered in other metres; and there are many instances in which a translation line for line and couplet for couplet naturally suggests itself, and in which it is sometimes difficult to avoid an involuntary rhyme; but the blank verse appears ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... from their masters. They, too, like himself, will suffer from such thieves. "Yes, trust them not; for there is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers that, with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shakescene in a countrie ... but it is pittie men of such rare wit should be subject to the pleasures of such rude grooms." ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... take it over to the world of everyday reality, to give it the atmosphere of utter verihood. He meant to use a style of biblical simplicity, bare of all ornament, dealing with the most elemental things. And this might seem easy, but in reality it was the hardest thing in the world—it was like blank verse. One might toil all day for a single phrase into ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... not long for this world. Perhaps I thought an early death rather picturesque; many young people do. There is a certain kind of poetry that fosters this idea; that delights in imaginary youthful victims, and has, reciprocally, its youthful devotees. One of my blank verse poems in the "Offering" is entitled "The Early ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... Morgante Maggiore, canto 25, st. 229, 230.—I have used blank verse, as affording facility for a more literal version than the corresponding ottava rima of the original. This passage of Pulci, which has not fallen under the notice of Humboldt, or any other writer on the same subject ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... Blanche's feet, and opened the "First Book" of Paradise Lost. His "system" as a reader of blank verse was simplicity itself. In poetry we are some of us (as many living poets can testify) all for sound; and some of us (as few living poets can testify) all for sense. Arnold was for sound. He ended every line ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... exprest in verse before: Jami tells of what everybody knows, under cover of a not very skilful Allegory. I have undoubtedly improved the whole by boiling it down to about a Quarter of its original size; and there are many pretty things in it, though the blank Verse is ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... versification of the 'Essay on Man,' we can understand his saying of 'Lycidas,' that 'the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing.' In one of the 'Ramblers' we are informed that the accent in blank verse ought properly to rest upon every second syllable throughout the whole line. A little variety must, he admits, be allowed to avoid satiety; but all lines which do not go in the steady jog-trot of alternate ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Petrarch and Du Bellay. The translations from Petrarch are almost literally the same, and are said to have been "formerly translated." In the Visions of Du Bellay there is this difference, that the earlier translations are in blank verse, and the later ones are rimed as sonnets; but the change does not destroy the manifest identity of the two translations. So that unless Spenser's publisher, to whom the poet had certainly given some of his genuine pieces for the volume, is not to be trusted,—which, of course, ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... nine representations the play was withdrawn. It is, indeed, altogether unsuited to the stage, and, even when perused in the closet, will be found hardly worthy of the author. He had not the slightest notion of what blank verse should be. A change in the last syllable of every other line would make the versification of the Vanity of Human Wishes closely resemble the versification of Irene. The poet, however, cleared, by his benefit nights, and by the sale of the copyright of his tragedy, about three ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... proceeded to recite some twenty lines of blank verse, for in those days people had more patience and fewer books, and exercised their memories much more than their descendants do. Listening was far from being ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... death" on a scale of such vastness. The majestic solemnity of the poem and the fine quality of its blank verse may be felt ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... the performance of "La Vida es Sueno". In England the play has been much studied for its literary value and the exceeding beauty and lyrical sweetness of some passages; but with the exception of a version by John Oxenford published in "The Monthly Magazine" for 1842, which being in blank verse does not represent the form of the original, no complete translation into English has been attempted. Some scenes translated with considerable elegance in the metre of the original were published by Archbishop Trench in 1856; but ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... could only come of ripe experience. Similarly the metre undergoes emancipation from the hampering restraints of fixed rule and becomes flexible enough to respond to every phase of human feeling. In the blank verse of the early plays a pause is strictly observed at the close of each line, and rhyming couplets are frequent. Gradually the poet overrides such artificial restrictions; rhyme largely disappears; recourse is more frequently made to prose; the pause is varied indefinitely; extra ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... second-hand, the Romans. They observed that though Dante used it, Shakespeare did not, and Milton did not, in their greatest works; and a good half of the time the first-rate moderns managed very well with blank verse. ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... talk in high-flown, blank verse sort of a way. "Ere long!" that wus somethin' new for ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... published in November, there is no merit either of plan or execution; for the plot is taken, with little change, from "The German's Tale," written by Harriet Lee, and the treatment is throughout prosaic. Byron was never a master of blank verse; but Werner, his solo success on the modern British stage, is written in a style fairly parodied by Campbell, when he cut part of the author's preface into lines, and pronounced them as good as any ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... or three among the long list of plays of this type, there runs like a vein of gold amid the dross, a noble and true idea that preserves them from the common fate, and one of these few pieces is 'Ingomar.' Its blank verse may be stilted, its action often forced and unreal; but the pictures it presents of a daughter's devotion, a maiden's purity, a brave man's love and supreme self-sacrifice, are drawn with a breadth and a simplicity of outline that make them at once appreciable, and they are pictures ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... it from his own lips that the perils of the way made him see the poetry of it all, and he said to himself that here was the theme for that great epic, which would be the chef d'oeuvre of his literary life. It is to be written in blank verse, with the hymns and secular songs he sang at each stop given in an appendix, and he confidently hopes that it will stand out as something conspicuous and distinct against the sombre ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... Ballad in Blank Verse on the Making of a Poet soars to a monotheistic conception of his ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... old straight-legged tables, does he? Well, I should say so! Serves him right for being an old bachelor, and having nothing but furniture and Ram Juna to illuminate existence. I should expect that combination to drive a man either to drink or to blank verse." ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... concessions to the demands of poetical treatment, we may assume pretty confidently that Mr. Davidson intended this "Ballad in Blank Verse of the Making of a Poet" for a soul's autobiography, of a kind. If so, I trust he will forgive me for doubting if he is at all likely to fulfil the poet's office as he conceives it here, or even to approach within measurable ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Kaiser und der Abt' (The Emperor and the Abbot), 'Der Wilde Jaeger' (The Wild Huntsman), all belong, like 'Lenore,' to the literary inheritance of the German people. Buerger attempted a translation of the Iliad in iambic blank verse, and a prose translation of 'Macbeth.' To him belongs also the credit of having restored to German literature the long-disused sonnet. His sonnets are among the best in the language, and elicited warm praise from Schiller as "models of their kind." Schiller had written a severe ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Contrary to the obligation of her high mission, she has received into her heart a human passion. Her peace is gone. Here the poet, in order to express the rapid alternations of feeling to which she is a prey, breaks from the even tenor of blank verse into a lyrical effusion of remarkable beauty and pathos. She is sought for to take her part in the ceremony of the coronation; it is now with a feeling of horror that she receives into her hands the sacred banner, which she had borne triumphantly to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... amusement of their chieftains at their public feasts, and that the portions given in metre were sung" ("Battle of Magh Rath," p. 12). The prose portions of this tale are represented in the translation by blank verse, and the lyrical portions ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... said Rumple, dodging round from the shady side of the wagon, where he had been walking and trying to compose blank verse about Australian roadside scenery, but ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... there is too much coarseness, with too little care of language, and not sufficient rapidity of narration. His great work is his Chase, which he undertook in his maturer age, when his ear was improved to the approbation of blank verse, of which, however, his two first lines give a bad specimen. To this poem praise cannot be totally denied. He is allowed by sportsmen to write with great intelligence of his subject, which is the first requisite ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... even in the tempered drawing-room tones of which resided a hint of the seats nearest the exit under the gallery, and her wonder at the luxury of gesture that went with them, movements which seemed to imply blank verse and to be thrown away upon two women and a little furniture. A consciousness stood in the room between them, and their commonplaces about the picturesqueness of the bazar rode on long absorbed regards, one reading, the other anxious to read; yet the encounter was so conventionally ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... write a play which shall convey to the general public an impression of antiquity is to make the characters speak blank verse and abstain from reference to steam, telegraphy, or any of the material conditions of their existence. The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex which civilization and philosophy have painfully struggled ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... Slavic languages, the elements of a regular system of long and short syllables. So long, however, as there have existed Polish poets, they have not measured, but, in imitation of the French, have counted the syllables. With the exception of a few recent poets, who have written in blank verse, and a few weak attempts to adapt the Greek principles of accent to the Polish language, all Polish poetry is, like the French, in rhyme; and the French Alexandrine is the favourite form of ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... and which now serves mainly to establish by comparison the fact that what was immortal in Tasso's art was the romance he ruthlessly rooted out. A further step in this transition from art to piety is marked by the poem upon the Creation of the World, called Le Sette Giornate. Written in blank verse, it religiously but tamely narrates the operation of the Divine Artificer, following the first chapter of Genesis and expanding the motive of each of the seven days with facile rhetoric. Of action and of human interest the poem has none; of artistic beauty little. The sustained descriptive ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Mr Reed was calculated to mislead. Some slight separate proofs of the age of this piece are pointed out in the new notes; but the general evidence is much more convincing. The versification is interlarded with rhymes like nearly all our earlier plays, and the blank verse is such as was written before Marlowe's improvements had generally been adopted. When the play was reprinted in 1662, some parts of it were perhaps a little modernised. The introduction of Malbecco and Paridell ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... 1860 Bjoernson went abroad and devoted three years to foreign travel, spending the greater part of his time in Italy. From Rome he sent home the historical drama "King Sverre" (1861), which is one of his weakest productions. It is written in blank verse, with occasional rhymes in the more impressive passages. Of dramatic interest in the ordinary sense, there is but little. It is a series of more or less animated scenes, from the period of the great civil war (1130-1240), connected by the personality of Sverre. Under the mask, however, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the same pen on miscellaneous subjects, which have been collected and reprinted, seemed as a relaxation from his severe scientific studies. Like certain other great mathematicians Herschel was also a poet, and he published a translation of the Iliad into blank verse. ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... gag that I wore out on humans of your ilk in Wyoming," went on Pink, warming to the subject. "Yuh load me with stuff that would bring the heehaw from a sheep-herder. Yuh can't even lie consistent to a pilgrim. You're a story that's been told and forgotten, a canto that won't rhyme, blank verse with club feet. You're the last, horrible example of ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... is the author of the English translation of this poem into blank verse, published in 1732. The preface and the notes create a desire to know the author. In one of the notes (17) he speaks of something as being "proved at large in my History of Christianity now ready for the press." I am not aware that any such ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... particular concerning this opera, after having begged his pardon for so long a preface to so short a work. It was originally intended only for a prologue to a play of the nature of "The Tempest;" which is a tragedy mixed with opera, or a drama, written in blank verse, adorned with scenes, machines, songs, and dances, so that the fable of it is all spoken and acted by the best of the comedians; the other part of the entertainment to be performed by the same singers and dancers who were introduced in this present opera. It ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... propensities. Dorset was the great public patron of poetry under William III., and Catharine Trotter, aged sixteen, having composed a tragedy, appealed to him for support. It was very graciously granted, and Agnes de Castro, in five acts and in blank verse, "written by a young lady," was produced at the Theatre Royal in 1695, under the "protection" of Charles Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty's Household. The event caused a considerable ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... continuous exclusion of the animation of common life, that thought remains lofty and language rich. Shakespeare, upon whose stage everything may happen, even the blinding of Gloster, and who has no formal check except what is implied in the slow, elaborate structure of blank verse, obtains time for reverie by an often encumbering Euphuism, and by such a loosening of his plot as will give his characters the leisure to look at life from without. Maeterlinck, to name the first modern of ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... girth and, what is worse, bull-necked. Only, as the points of an ox are different from those of a poodle, the criticism is something beside the mark: and there is not much more virtue in the objection to Shakespeare's later tragedies that they are not written in rhymed verse. Blank verse, however, is not in the great tradition; and the French critic, with one eye fixed submissively on authority, doubts whether he would be justified in admiring it unreservedly. Such are the inevitable consequences of conventionality: and French conventionality is, in its turn, the inevitable ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... care of thatthrow it all on the publishers. I do long to see your labours commenced. You will choose blank verse, doubtless?it is more grand and magnificent for an historical subject; and, what concerneth you, my friend, it is, I have an idea, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... great poem, in 1856, was Aurora Leigh, a novel in blank verse, "the most mature," she says in the preface, "of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered." Walter Savage Landor said of it: "In many pages there is the wild imagination of Shakespeare. I had no idea that any one ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... Woman's Last Word," or the picturesque rhymed verse telling a story of an experience, such as "Childe Roland" and "The Statue and the Bust"—from their more complex companions, which were almost altogether in blank verse, and, in general, markedly personified a typical man in his environment, a Cleon or Fra Lippo, a Rudel or a Blougram. These boldly sculptured figures he set apart from the others as the fit components of the more closely related group which ever ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... 'Prometheus' of AEschylus. To speak of this production moderately (not modestly), it is the most miserable of all miserable versions of the class. It was completed (in the first place) in thirteen days—the iambics thrown into blank verse, the lyrics into rhymed octosyllabics and the like,—and the whole together as cold as Caucasus, and as flat as the nearest plain. To account for this, the haste may be something; but if my mind had been properly ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... laughed, and he had not laughed for a week—in the lightness of our hearts and the divine intoxication of our brains. I know that I felt as though all the varied genius of which the human intellect is capable had descended upon me. I could have spoken in blank verse of Shakesperian beauty, all sorts of great ideas flashed through my mind; it was as though the bonds of my flesh had been loosened and left the spirit free to soar to the empyrean of its native power. ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... of blank verse in the book. This prologue to "Orestes," by Mr. Stephen Phillips, has strength, is firm in outline, somewhat tardy in movement, fit for sonorous declamation. The gravity which I have indicated as a ruling quality of all these youthful compositions makes itself felt here in its proper place. ...
— Primavera - Poems by Four Authors • Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose and Arthur Shearly Cripps
... quatrain; strophe, antistrophe^. verse, rhyme, assonance, crambo^, meter, measure, foot, numbers, strain, rhythm; accentuation &c (voice) 580; dactyl, spondee, trochee, anapest &c; hexameter, pentameter; Alexandrine; anacrusis^, antispast^, blank verse, ictus. elegiacs &c adj.; elegiac verse, elegaic meter, elegaic poetry. poet, poet laureate; laureate; bard, lyrist^, scald, skald^, troubadour, trouvere [Fr.]; minstrel; minnesinger, meistersinger [G.]; improvisatore^; versifier, sonneteer; rhymer, rhymist^, rhymester; ballad monger, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of Barcelona (1500-1544), in concert with his friend Garcilasso, Italianized Castilian poetry. He was the author of the Leandro, a poem in blank verse, of canzoni, and sonnets after the model of Petrarch, and of The Allegory.—History of Spanish Literature, by George Ticknor, 1888, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... thou wilt not, 's hart, what's your god's name? Apollo? Ay, Apollo. If this melancholy rogue (Lorenzo here) do not come, grant, that he do turn Fool presently, and never hereafter be able to make a good jest, or a blank verse, but live in more penury of wit and invention, than either the Hall-Beadle, or Poet Nuntius." Well, it is the strangest letter that ever I read. Is this the man, my son so oft hath praised To be the happiest, and most precious wit That ever was familiar ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... attempted the epic style, including Trissino, who in his "Italia Liberata" relates the victories of Belisarius over the Goths in blank verse. His fame, however, rests on "Sofonisba," the first Italian tragedy, in fact "the first regular tragedy in ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... "Blank verse, which, unless in the drama, no one except Milton ever wrote who could rhyme, became the order of the day,—or else such rhyme as looked still blanker than the verse without it. I am aware that Johnson has said, after some hesitation, that he could not 'prevail upon himself to ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... Macready, and the real water tank in the Cataract of the Ganges helped to increase the attractions of John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons. But we ourselves are evidently in a parlous state at the present day, when actors vainly endeavor to struggle through twenty lines of blank verse—when we are told mechanical effects and vast armies of supers make up the production of historical plays—when pathological details, we are told, are always well received—when the "psychonosological" (whatever that may be)—[laughter], ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... is essential to the full sense of the meaning and of the beauty of all poetry. Even the rhymeless flow of blank verse is absolutely necessary to an accurate and entire perception of the effect the author intends to produce: it is in both cases as the colouring to a picture. It may be, indeed, that part of the composition which appeals ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... ambitions and hopes were disappointed in many other ways. This book was published in 1718. It was called "Psalterium Americanum. A Book of Psalms in a translation exactly conformed unto the Original; but all in blank verse. Fitted unto the tunes commonly used in the Church." By a curious arrangement of brackets and the use of two kinds of print these psalms could be divided into two separate metres and could be sung to tunes of either long or short metre. After each psalm were introduced explanations written ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... in his life. When, shortly before he died, his house caught fire, and the mild curate of the parish begged him to withdraw from the library of books he loved so well, he flatly refused to listen, and cried roundly, in a line of vehement blank verse, "By the immortal gods, I will not ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... encounter a prepossession not very advantageous to any writer: that the Author was treading in a path already so admirably trod by THOMSON; and might be adding one more to an attempt already so often, but so injudiciously and unhappily made, of transmuting that noble Poem from Blank Verse into Rhime; ... from its own pure native Gold into an alloyed Metal of incomparably less ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... about the L2000, and the final separation scene—which affords a curious view of the marriage tie and on which Leigh Hunt has founded an argument for divorce. This play contains several examples of Farquhar's curious habit of breaking out into a kind of broken blank verse occasionally for a few lines in the more serious passages. Partaking as it does of the elements of both comedy and force, it is the prototype of Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, which it resembles in many respects. It will be remembered that Miss Hardcastle compares herself to ...
— The Beaux-Stratagem • George Farquhar
... the night in reading that magnificent translation in Italian blank verse, but the reading was often interrupted by my pupil's laughter when we came to some rather ticklish passage. She was highly amused by the account of the chance which gave 'AEneas an opportunity of proving his love ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... I shall mention, is taken out of an ingenious Poem, entituled, The Tale of the Swans, written by William Vallans in blank Verse in the time of Queen Elizabeth; for the reprinting of which, we are obliged to that ingenious and most industrious Preserver and Restorer of Antiquities, Mr. ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob
... good, and I'm glad of it ... because they're looking on you as my protege ... holding me responsible for you. Munday, in the Schiller class, tells me you sometimes bring in your daily lesson in Wilhelm Tell, translated into blank verse ... and good stuff, too.... And King says he turns over the most difficult lines in Horace in class for you to translate ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... succession the livings of Stratford-on-Avon and Clapham. He added further to his income, and doubtless to his anxieties, by keeping a school at Richmond. He wrote a tragedy entitled The Rape, a History of the Goths and Vandals, a translation of the Aeneid into blank verse, and an Ode for St. Cecilia's Day; but, unless for his share in the version of the Psalms, his literary reputation is well nigh as dead as ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... magnificent poetry in dramatic form, Beddoes will survive to students, not to readers, of English poetry, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Ebenezer Jones and Charles Wells. Charles Wells was certainly more of a dramatist, a writer of more sustained and Shakespearean blank verse; Ebenezer Jones had certainly a more personal passion to express in his rough and tumultuous way; but Beddoes, not less certainly, had more of actual poetical genius than either. And in the end only one thing counts: ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... finest passage of his 'Zenobie et Rhadamiste', which I had translated into blank verse. Silvia was delighted to see the pleasure enjoyed by Crebillon in hearing, at the age of eighty, his own lines in a language which he knew thoroughly and loved as much as his own. He himself recited the same passage in French, and politely pointed out the parts in which he thought that I had ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Surrey's youth showed itself in whimsical satires, in classical translations, in love-sonnets, and in paraphrases of the Psalms. In his version of two books of the AEneid he was the first to introduce into England the Italian blank verse which was to play so great a part in our literature. But with the poetic taste of the Renascence Surrey inherited its wild and reckless energy. Once he was sent to the Fleet for challenging a gentleman to fight. Release enabled him to join his father in an expedition against Scotland, ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... with a careful covering up of dark secrets to be revealed only at an opportune moment. The large simplicity of the theme would be frittered away, and every opportunity for deliberate pathos would be insisted upon. Probably Juliet would die in blank verse, disguised as prose. But Mercutio, altho he would certainly cease to be a gentleman, would be a most amusing personality whose whimsical behavior would seem highly laughable; and the nurse might become another ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... discourse," said Mr Gosport, "is not more singular than the manner, for without any seeming effort or consciousness, he runs into blank verse perpetually. I have made much enquiry about him, but all I am able to learn, is that he was certainly confined, at one part of his life, in a private mad-house: and though now, from not being mischievous, he is set at liberty, his looks, language, and whole behaviour, announce the former ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... stately SUBSTANTIVES would march Like Switzers, and bear all the fields before 'em; Carry their weight; show fair, like Deeds enroll'd; Not Writs, that are first made and after filed. Thence first came up the title of Blank Verse;— You know, sir, what Blank signifies;—when the sense, First framed, is tied with adjectives like points, Hang 't, 'tis pedantic vulgar poetry. Let children, when they versify, stick here And there, these piddling words for want of matter. Poets ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... thought."[25] Dryden made some experiments in tragi-comedy, but, in general, classical comedy was pure comedy—the prose comedy of manners—and classical tragedy admitted no comic intermixture. Whether tragedy should be in rhyme, after the French manner, or in blank verse, after the precedent of the old English stage, was a moot point. Dryden at first argued for rhyme and used it in his "heroic plays"; and it is significant that he defended its use on the ground that it would act as a check ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... stimulus to the imitation of Italian meters and poets which we have seen existed in a premature state since the reign of John II. The man who first achieved real success in the hendecasyllable, combined in sonnets, octaves, terza rima and blank verse, was Juan BOSCAN ALMOGAVER (1490?-1542), a Catalan of wealth and culture. Boscan was handicapped by writing in a tongue not native to him and by the constant holding of foreign models before his eyes, and he was ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... blank verse, Fairy? Keep it up, you haven't far to go!—There they are! Look at them, Aunt Grace. They cheated. They tried to get all my hard-earned ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... It was really quite Shakespearian. You see I have 'the bard' on the brain. We have been taking up Elizabethan English in one of my classes, and once I become thoroughly saturated with Shakespearian verse I am likely to quote it on all occasions. Don't be surprised if I burst forth into blank verse at the table or any other public place. But here I've been running along like a talking machine when you are 'full fathom five' in the blues. Can't you tell your aged and estimable friend, Emma, what ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... revival of sonneteering in Italy in the 16th century, and a number of Wiat's poems were adaptations of the sonnets and canzoni of Petrarch and later poets. Others were imitations of Horace's satires and epistles. Surrey introduced the Italian blank verse into English in his translation of two books of the Aeneid. The love poetry of Tottel's Miscellany is polished and artificial, like the models which it followed. Dante's {66} Beatrice was a child, and so was Petrarch's Laura. Following their example, Surrey addressed his love ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... went on to argue in his own mind (though we need not say that blank verse is not argument) that what he had got it was his duty to keep, and that, if at one time he had entertained ideas of a certain restitution, which shall be nameless, the prospect by a CERTAIN MARRIAGE ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... blank verse, but that of the latter is very blank indeed, and possesses little in common with Milton's style, except the absence of rhyme. It ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 214, December 3, 1853 • Various
... who was with him, and had not yet had time to study a speech, confessed his last words to have been, "Jai froid."—"I am cold." This, however, would nave made no figure on the banners of a funeral procession; and Le Pelletier was made to die, like the hero of a tragedy, uttering blank verse. ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... ... was ... much admired by all at home for the poems he writ, though he was then blind; chiefly that of "Paradise Lost," in which there is a nobleness both of contrivance and execution, that, though he affected to write in blank verse without rhyme, and made many new and rough words, yet it was esteemed the beautifullest and perfectest poem that ever was writ, at least in our language.—Swift. A mistake, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... Nations' witnessed a painful scene. The English moralist gave the Scotch one the lie direct, and the Scotch moralist applied to the English one a phrase which would have done discredit to the lips of a costermonger; but this notwithstanding, when Boswell reported that Adam Smith preferred rhyme to blank verse, Johnson hailed the news as enthusiastically as did Cedric the Saxon the English origin of the bravest knights in the retinue of the Norman king. "Did Adam say that?" he shouted: "I love him for it. I could hug ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... while we had a Tupper epidemic, and everyone grew busy writing blank verse—very blank. Then came an epidemic of Carlyle, and everyone wrote turgid, involved, twisted and breakneck sentences, each noun with as many verbs as Brigham Young had wives. Then followed a romantic craze, and everyone struggled ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... possession of Mr. H. Buxton Forman, C.B., and I am indebted to his kindness for the following description: "The pamphlet consists of four 8vo leaves, viz. half-title ('The Irish Avatar,' in bold capitals, with blank verse), pp. [1], [2] Text, pp. 3-8. The poem begins on the third page with a dropped head, 'The Irish Avatar' again, and the first four verses. Pp. 4-7 contain six verses each, and p. 8 the remaining four, making up thirty-two in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... engines are squirting over his own little nest and brood. Lift these figures up but a story from the basement to the ground-floor, and the fun is gone. We may be en pleine tragedie. Ellen may breathe her last sigh in blank verse, calling down blessings upon James the profligate who deserts her. Henry is a hero, and epaulettes are on his shoulders. Atqui sciebat, &c., whatever tortures are in store for him, he will be ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... create; and if we were poets, I suppose we should before now have as good as drank some of that Long Island champagne. Speaking of poets reminds me that I did n't tell you how charmed I was with those translations from the Odyssey; the blank verse is so simple, clear, ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... peculiar species of blank verse in which the original is composed, in order that the English reader may form an exact idea thereof, and though by having done so my poetry may have somewhat of a cramped, embarrassed gait, I have a firm ...
— The Death of Balder • Johannes Ewald
... I inquired, "of the passage on Social Systems?" I have forgotten to say that the poem was in blank verse, and divided into parts, ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... melancholy, and this is fatal to popularity. As he himself said, "The life of the people is such that in literature they require joy." But not only his thought, his very style, is anti-popular. Much of his most elaborate work is in blank verse, and that in itself is a heavy draw-back. Much also is in exotic and unaccustomed metres, which to the great bulk of English readers must always be more of a discipline than of a delight. And, even when he wrote ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... his world are quite different from ours. The orchestra, the foot-lights, and the green baize curtain, divide us. He is a monarch half his time—his entrance and his exit proclaimed by flourish of trumpet. He speaks in blank verse, is wont to take his seat at gilded banquets, to drink nothing out of a pasteboard goblet. The actor's world has a history amusing to read, and lines of noble and splendid traditions, stretching back to charming Nelly's time, and earlier. The actor has strange experiences. He sees ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... did little that would attract notice. As a child and a boy young Tennyson was remarked both for acquisition and performance. His own reminiscences of his childhood varied somewhat in detail. In one place we learn that at the age of eight he covered a slate with blank verse in the manner of Jamie Thomson, the only poet with whom he was then acquainted. In another passage he says, "The first poetry that moved me was my own at five years old. When I was eight I remember making a line I thought ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... Sophocles and Homer, with Terence, Tacitus, Virgil, Horace and Ovid, were constantly pillaged for thoughts to piece out the theatrical robes and blank verse eloquence of playwrights who only received for their best accepted works from five to twenty pounds; proprietors and stage managers driving hard bargains with these brilliant, bacchanalian ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... in its kind. The smoothness with which the verses glide, and the elasticity with which they bound, is, to our ears at least, very pleasing. We are inclined to think that if Addison had left heroic couplets to Pope, and blank verse to Rowe, and had employed himself in writing airy and spirited songs, his reputation as a poet would have stood far higher than it now does. Some years after his death, Rosamond was set to new music by Doctor Arne; and was performed with complete success. Several passages long retained their popularity, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay |
