Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use. Robert B. Shaw . Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Pp. xi+305.

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewBlank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use. Robert B. Shaw . Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Pp. xi+305.William H. PritchardWilliam H. PritchardAmherst College Search for more articles by this author Amherst CollegePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreSeventy years ago, in his provocative essay “Is Verse a Dying Technique?” Edmund Wilson argued that, increasingly, post-Flaubertian prose fiction had taken over many of the “poetic” qualities that once were only found in verse. Speaking as a twentieth-century modern man, he asserted rather grandly that there was no verse technique “more obsolete than blank verse”: “The old iambic pentameters have no longer any relation whatever to the tempo and language of our lives. Yeats was the last who could write them, and he only because he inhabited, in Ireland and in imagination, a grandiose anachronistic world. You cannot deal with contemporary events in an idiom which was already growing trite in Tennyson's and Browning's day” (The Triple Thinkers [New York: Oxford University Press, 1948], 26–27). Wilson stuck his neck out with this pronouncement and seemed unaware that in his time, poets like Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, whether or not they were dealing with “contemporary events” (whatever those might be), had produced blank verse of outstanding quality. And there would be more to come in the century's second half, as Robert B. Shaw demonstrates in this altogether welcome survey of the subject.Mr. Shaw has surprisingly few predecessors in the field: he cites a book of three essays by John Addington Symonds, Blank Verse (New York: Scribner, 1895), and George Saintsbury's massive three-volume A History of English Prosody (London: Macmillan, 1906–10). A century later, the most recent edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993) assures us that the advent of free verse sounded the death knell of blank verse, but, with reference to the familiar words of Mark Twain, Shaw thinks that rumors of its death have been exaggerated. His preface invites us to try out the numerous passages of verse by saying them aloud in order to discern “the key to [their] movement”: “Readers of this book will be on the right track if they find themselves vocalizing, annoying librarians and alarming passengers in neighboring seats on the subway. This is one of the more virtuous ways I can think of to get in trouble” (x). The humorous, offhand tone is welcome and comes into play again when he insists that blank verse is not a “halfway house between rhyme and open form.” Its ability to generate “a sense of ongoingness,” of “commanding momentum,” is a major virtue; we should not think of it as “a ‘lite’ version of formalist poetry; nor is it free verse in a coat and tie” (3). These impressionistic definitions of what blank verse is not are a way of suggesting what it is or can be.Shaw's technique of scansion is minimal and flexible (he often provides alternate ways a line could be scanned), consisting of “x” for an unstressed syllable, “/” for a stressed one, with “\” for an “intermediate” degree of stress (xi). But he knows, as does anyone with an ear, that one da-DUM is different from another da-DUM—that, in another good formulation, “not all iambs are created equal” (16). His opening chapter, “The Sounds of Blank Verse,” usefully distinguishes the form from both rhyming verse and free verse, also from prose. The last distinction is an important one since the notion is still around that blank verse is a “blood-relative” to prose (11). One recalls that when Frost published North of Boston (1914), some of his critics thought the blank verse of many of the poems “free” enough so that it was indistinguishable from prose, from conversational talk. And any teacher of college students will find many of them cheerfully calling blank verse “free verse,” while at other times speaking of blank verse as “prose.”In chapter 2, Shaw launches a fifty-page historical survey of the form, from its beginnings in the Earl of Surrey's translation of part of The Aeneid (1557) and Sackville and Norton's turgid drama, Gorboduc (1561–62). Mention of these two monuments brought back horrible memories of graduate school when I was introduced to them by the distinguished editor Hyder Rollins. To be fair to him, Rollins did not venerate these early efforts but knew they were the beginnings of what Shaw terms “part of a larger story of the rescue of poetry from [a] state of poetic anarchy” (33). Fifty years later, Shakespeare's mature blank verse gives us not just a good line or two but “verse paragraphs that sustain themselves over unpredictable spans, paradoxically challenging as well as satisfying the demands of the meter” (41). In other words, lines like these, spoken by Othello as he vows to Iago his unshakeable purpose against Desdemona:Like to the Pontic Sea,Whose icy current and compulsive courseNev'r keeps retiring ebb, but keeps due onTo the Propontic and the Hellespont,Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent paceShall nev'r look back, nev'r ebb to humble love,Till that a capable and wide revengeSwallow them up.(43)Bernard Shaw quoted this as a great example of what he called Shakespeare's word-music, and Robert Shaw notes how the extended simile and syntax give “propulsion to the onflowing of the meter” (43).His guided tour through three centuries of blank verse includes especially rewarding stops at Milton and at one of Milton's eighteenth-century successors, William Cowper, some lines from whose The Task (1785) Shaw uses to illustrate how Cowper “domesticated” his predecessor. It is the morning after a snowstorm, andThe cattle mourn in corners where the fenceScreens them, and seem half petrified to sleepIn unrecumbent sadness.(64) “The combination of ‘half petrified’ and ‘unrecumbent,’ which runs the risk of ponderousness, unexpectedly succeeds in bringing vividness to the scene. It highlights the patient stillness of animals after a hard night, standing upright and waiting to be fed” (64). Even if The Task is perhaps “too quiet and rambling” (64) for modern tastes, it can, Shaw rightly asserts, be read with pleasure the way most long poems from the eighteenth century cannot.For this reader, the most original and useful part of the survey is the two chapters on how various poets used blank verse in the first and second halves of the last century. Although the earlier period chapter is titled “Blank Verse and Modernism,” the two poets who made most distinctive use of it—Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost—worked out old-fashioned ways to be new. In their individual ways, which Shaw describes excellently in his pages on each, they were altogether more hospitable to blank verse than those who, like Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot to a degree, were concerned to disrupt or reject the form (“To break the pentameter, that was the first heave,” says Pound in one of the Cantos [122]). Eliot's claim in “Reflections on Vers Libre” (1917) was that the “constant suggestion and skillful evasion of iambic pentameter” —such as he found in Pound's “Near Perigord”—provided a way of avoiding the anarchy threatened by free verse (124). It is in “Gerontion” (1920), Shaw suggests and carefully demonstrates, that this “prosodic theory” works itself out in very calculated manipulations in and out of traditional pentameter. So in lines that are prosaically “off,” we are invited “to divine the latent possibility of iambic pentameter even as it fails to materialize” (126).That Shaw is a critic rather than merely a bland guide is emphatically shown in his pages on Wallace Stevens, the discussion of whose pentameter concludes “Blank Verse and Modernism.” In the essay “The Free-Verse Line in Stevens” (1998), the poet Donald Justice claimed that Stevens followed Eliot's suggestion of “withdrawing” from the form by loosening it with anapestic substitutions, or adding a third syllable to the two syllable basic iamb (209). But Shaw is more skeptical than was Justice as to the effects of this procedure on Stevens's later verse. He sees Stevens's growing fondness for the tercet stanza in many of his later longer poems as a form more concerned with the sentence than with the line, indeed even permitting “laxity” in the line by way of getting right the elaborate sentence. I am not aware that this observation has been made about Stevens previously. Shaw remarks, severely but sensibly, that the later Stevens “operates on the treacherous border between metrical and free verse” (160) and observes that some of his adulatory readers do not seem to note when the border has been crossed.In “After Modernism,” Shaw valiantly engages, in brief or at length, with perhaps too many poets—fifty of them by my count—from Jarrell, Lowell, and Berryman down to various contemporary practitioners in the mode, of which he himself is one. (He is, however, too modest to subject his own blank verse to analysis.) He finds that the conversational style of Lowell's unrhymed sonnets “makes meter something of an afterthought”; like Stevens's tercets, the sonnet form for Lowell amounts to “little more than a familiar box to fill” (171). Perhaps the most valuable pages in the entire book are the twenty he devotes to four poets who are “essential figures” in the blank verse of the last century's second half: Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, and James Merrill. One thinks of their formal mastery, especially that of Wilbur and Merrill, as most apparent in the brilliance and ingenuity of their rhymed poems; in fact, their achievements in blank verse are also notable. To take only Wilbur's case, his poems in the mode are relatively few but include such masterly efforts as “The Mind-Reader,” “Walking to Sleep,” “Lying,” and (most recently) the beautiful “This Pleasing, Anxious Being.” In these poems, Shaw acutely points out, the idiom “seems not so much contemporary but timeless, attuned equally to modern and traditional properties of poetry” (189). He identifies as modern “the photographic sharpness of Wilbur's imagery” but also sees that behind much of his blank verse “the presiding genius is Milton,” though a Milton “tactfully scaled back from epic proportions to those of lyric meditation” (189). Wilbur, along with Nemerov, Hecht, and Merrill, are the most conspicuous and expert examples of blank verse's aliveness four hundred years after it began.In his final chapter, “Writing Blank Verse Today,” Shaw compares the poet in this medium to a tightrope walker who knows “how tautly stretched [the rope] is and what slight degree of give in it can be tolerated” (251). The metrical line or “sturdy rope” can support, in the hands of an expert, “steady feats of passage, colorful jugglings, unexpected pauses, even stumbles which may appear spontaneous but are carefully rehearsed” (251). At the conclusion of Blank Verse, one feels admiring gratitude to Robert B. Shaw, who has guided us with such imaginative care for a particular verse medium and also for the larger enterprise of poetry. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 1August 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/653626 Views: 621Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.