What "blank verse" means in poetry

A term you'll meet in poetic form.

Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. That is the whole definition. It is the verse form of most of English serious literature for four centuries — most of Shakespeare's plays, most of Milton, all of Wordsworth's longer poems, and a great deal of the 20th-century long poem.

Why "blank"

The "blank" refers to the absence of rhyme. The lines end without matching sounds, which makes the verse sound closer to elevated speech than to song. Blank verse is what English poets reach for when they want the discipline of meter but the freedom of unrhymed thought.

The history

The form was introduced into English in the 1550s by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who used it to translate parts of the Aeneid. Within a generation, the playwrights of the 1580s and 1590s — Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare — had taken it up for the stage. By Hamlet and King Lear, blank verse had become the medium of English serious drama.

Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) gave blank verse its epic credentials. Milton's preface to the second edition explicitly rejected rhyme as the "invention of a barbarous age," arguing that blank verse was closer to the heroic verse of Homer and Virgil. From that point forward, blank verse was the default for any English poem with serious ambition.

Why English poetry favors it

Three reasons blank verse stuck:

Length without strain. Rhyme demands a closing sound every two or four lines. Over a long poem, this becomes audible artifice. Blank verse can sustain narrative or philosophical thought for thousands of lines without that rhyme-fatigue.
Speech-likeness. Iambic pentameter is close to the natural cadence of English. (See our entry on iambic pentameter.) Without rhyme, it sounds like elevated speech rather than song.
Flexibility. Caesurae can fall anywhere; enjambment can be heavy or light; substitutions can vary the meter. (See our entry on caesura and our entry on enjambment.) Blank verse gives the poet a stable ground and enormous expressive room.

Blank verse vs. free verse

These are often confused but are opposites:

Blank verse is metrical. Five iambs per line. The meter is strict (with permitted substitutions).
Free verse has no fixed meter. The line is whatever the poet says it is. Free verse comes into English poetry mostly in the late 19th century (Whitman) and dominates the 20th.

Blank verse is unrhymed but metrical. Free verse is unmetered. They are not the same.

Canonical blank-verse works

Most of Shakespeare's major plays.
Milton, Paradise Lost (1667) and Paradise Regained (1671).
Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850).
Tennyson, The Idylls of the King.
Robert Frost — much of his apparently conversational verse is blank verse in disguise.
Wallace Stevens — many of his long poems use blank verse with sophisticated variation.

How to read it

When you read a passage of blank verse, the useful instinct is to listen for the meter under the syntax. The pentameter is the heart; the sentence is what breathes through it. The play between the two — sentence pulling against line — is where blank verse becomes expressive. A poet who locks the sentence and line together produces oratory. A poet who lets them slip and rejoin, like Shakespeare or Milton, produces music.

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