What is a good example of a Blank Verse Poem?
Shakespeare is the most notable practitioner of blank verse as a dramatic form, and his plays are, in fact, written predominantly, though not entirely, in blank verse. Even in the twentieth century T. S. Eliot and Maxwell Anderson used blank verse as a vehicle for staged drama, though by that time their efforts were self-consciously anachronistic. Blank verse has also been a favored form for reflective and narrative poems. The stately, majestic cadences of John Milton’s religious epic “Paradise Lost?demonstrate the extraordinary incantatory power of that pattern maintained over long stretches of poetry. Take, for example, the single long sentence that constitutes the first sixteen lines of the “Invocation?to Book I of “Paradise Lost? Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us and regain the blissful seat, Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret to
