Blank Verse: “Ancient Liberty Recovered”
Bill Coyle
The phrase is John Milton’s, from the preface to Paradise Lost, where he defends his choice of what he terms “English heroic verse without rime” for his poem. Devised by Surrey for his translation of The Aeneid, blank verse went on to become arguably the most popular verse form in English, the meter in which Marlowe and Shakespeare wrote their plays, Coleridge and Wordsworth their meditations, and Frost his dramatic monologues. We’ll look at examples of blank verse by these and other, more recent, practitioners, and try our hands at writing some ourselves.
