Download: The Blank-Verse Tradition from Milton to Stevens: Freethinking and the Crisis of Modernity (Weinfield 2015).
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Blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, has been central to English poetry since the Renaissance. It is the basic vehicle of Shakespeare’s plays and the form in which Milton chose to write Paradise Lost. Milton associated it with freedom, and the Romantics, connecting it in turn with freethinking, used it to explore change and confront modernity, sometimes in unexpectedly radical ways. Henry Weinfield’s detailed readings of the masterpieces of English blank verse focus on Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson and Stevens. He traces the philosophical and psychological struggles underlying these poets’ choice of form and genre, and the extent to which their work is marked, consciously or not, by the influence of other poets. Unusually attuned to echoes between poems, this study sheds new light on how important poetic texts, most of which are central to the literary canon, unfold as works of art.
Review
“The Blank-Verse Tradition refreshingly rings with a pure love of these great canonical poems. Such intelligent attention reminds us that they continue to be worth formalist book-length studies.”
— Review of English Studies
“The author proposes that blank verse as deployed and championed by Milton in Paradise Lost lends itself to not only freedom but to freethinking (by which he means independence of thought), as evidenced by selected poems by Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley Tennyson and Stevens. The book’s strengths lie in much careful explication de texte and in the light shed on many inter-textual linkages.”
— Archie Burnett, Milton Quarterly
