ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the expressive possibilities of blank verse. It explores the dramatic, manipulative speeches of Book II of John Milton’s Paradise Lost ; the mixture of conviction and wishfulness heard within Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”; and the complex, shifting affordances of pentameter in Gwendolyn Brooks’ “In the Mecca”. In these examples as in blank verse more broadly, the five-beat line works with and against the rhythms of speech. At the same time, however, the formal effects of blank verse are entangled with its cultural importance, an entanglement that poets continue to draw on today.
