Blank verse

Miltonic blank verse was widely imitated in the 18th century by such poets as James Thomson (in The Seasons) and William Cowper (in The Task).

Romantic English poets such as William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats used blank verse as a major form.

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 allotted 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.

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;...

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.

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.

All is not lost; the unconquerable Will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield: Milton also wrote Paradise Regained and parts of Samson Agonistes in blank verse.

At the close of the 18th century, William Cowper ushered in a renewal of blank verse with his volume of kaleidoscopic meditations, The Task, published in 1784.

Wordsworth's verse recovers some of the freedom of Milton's, but is generally far more regular: Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters!

– Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs... Coleridge's blank verse is more technical than Wordsworth's, but he wrote little of it: Well, they are gone, and here must I remain, This lime-tree bower my prison!

Babylon Ist von Jerusalem, wie ich den Weg, Seitab bald rechts, bald links, zu nehmen bin Genötigt worden, gut zweihundert Meilen; Und Schulden einkassieren, ist gewiss Auch kein Geschäft, das merklich fördert, das So von der Hand sich schlagen lässt.