Sill with us after all thse years …

… Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use. Robert B. Shaw . Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Pp. xi 305. | Modern Philology: Vol 108, No 1. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

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.”