Blank verse

The blank verse, or loose verse, is a type of poetic composition that is characterized by having a regular metric and lacking rhyme. In English, blank verse has typically employed iambic pentameter.

The first known blank verse in the English language was written by Henry Howard, Earl of Arundel and Surrey, in his translation of the Aeneid (ca. 1554). Howard may have been inspired by the original Latin text when creating this verse, since neither classical Latin nor Greek verse used rhyme; or he may have been inspired by the Italian form of the verso sciolto, which also contained no rhyme.

In 1561 Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville introduced it on the scene in their tragedy Gorboduc, and it was Christopher Marlowe who popularized it as well as establishing it as the preponderant verse in English drama in the Elizabethan era, being William Shakespeare who would raise it to its highest levels.

Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost is also written in blank verse. After Milton, English poets considered blank verse outdated and favored the use of couplets. Some English romantic poets, such as William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, returned to using blank verse, revaluing it. Soon after, Alfred Tennyson devoted great attention to blank verse, using it, for example, in his long narrative poem The Princess , as well as in one of his most famous poems, Ulysses .

Russian bylina is also written in blank verse.

In Spanish literature, Lope de Vega's New art of making comedies in this time, is an example of composition in blank verse, in this case in hendecasyllables without rhyme.