blank verse

English

Noun

blank verse (countable and uncountable, plural blank verses)

1. (poetry) A poetic form with regular meter, particularly iambic pentameter, but no fixed rhyme scheme.

   Milton's command of blank verse exceeds even Shakespeare's.

   • 1592, Robert Greene, Groats-Worth of Witte, Bought with a Million of Repentance, London: imprinted for William Wright, folio F¹v:

     [T]here is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.

   • 1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, “The Spirit of Life”, in She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC, page 288:

     I could have spoken in blank verse of Shakespearean beauty, all sorts of great ideas flashed through my mind; it was as though the bonds of my flesh had been loosened, and left the spirit free to soar to the empyrean of its native power.

   • 2006, Philip Hobsbaum, “The heroic couplet”, in Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form, Routledge, →ISBN, page 18:

     Soon after Surrey's translation of Virgil, blank verse became a persuasive rival to the heroic couplet.

Translations

a poetic form with regular meter

• Catalan: vers blanc m
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 無韻詩／无韵诗 (zh) (wúyùnshī)

• French: vers blanc (fr) m
• German: Blankvers (de) m
• Hebrew: חָרוּז לָבָן (he) m (ẖarúz laván)
• Italian: verso sciolto m
• Latin: versus solutus m
• Polish: wiersz biały m
• Portuguese: verso branco (pt) m, verso solto m
• Romanian: vers alb
• Russian: белый стих (ru) m (belyj stix)
• Spanish: verso blanco m
• Tagalog: ditugmang taludturan
• Ukrainian: білий вірш (uk) m (bilyj virš)
• Welsh: mesur diodl m